2015 Oct 20

Hands Off! How to Release Product Faster

What are the three biggest impediments, or roadblocks, to fast product cycles, especially in the cloud? Incomplete Testing. If you are not 100% confident that your testing covers every known use case, you will be fearful of releasing. Actually, fear of the risk of deployment often is the "canary in the coal mine" sign that your testing is incomplete. The other sign is infrequent releases, defined in the Internet era as less frequently than every few days.

2015 Oct 19

Performance Tests Redux

A few weeks ago, "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests," gave us a great example of how even a good performance test can be ruined through a few (seemingly) small mistakes. Today, let's revisit performance tests with an example of performance tests that I constructed on behalf of a client, as an example of how to do them correctly. Even good performance tests suffer from a paradox. On the one hand, you really want to understand how the product will perform in the real world, with all of its environmental conditions.

2015 Oct 14

Cloud to Culture

If you want to change technology that requires a change in process or, more seriously, culture, then you need to change the culture first. Get your people on board and then make the changes. Right? Perhaps not. Or at least not always. If your culture is flexible and open, people collaborate across groups and you are staying competitive, then, yes, change some of the culture to new ways of working, then adopt new technology that requires the different mindset.

2015 Oct 1

Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests

Mark Twain attributed the phrase "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics" to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, which suits the Prime Minister's known wit, although its provenance has been questioned. If Twain or Disraeli had lived in the days of computers and software, he probably would have coined the phrase as "Lies, Damned Lies and Performance Tests." Perhaps Twain's great novel of Americans touring the desolate Holy Land of the late 19th century might have been called, "

2015 Sep 21

Smart Design in Containers

In a previous article, we invented "Conway's Corollary" - how design determines scale. Today, we will look at another case from the hottest technology of the last year: containers. When designing software - any piece of software - the most important criterion is not, "what features does it have," or "how well is it documented," although those are very important. It is not even, "how sexy is the user interface,"

2015 Sep 9

Conway's Corollary - Design Determines Scale

When I went to business school, I worked closely with an incredibly smart woman with whom I shared a very similar method of thinking and mindset. When we would find the same responses to the same questions in the same manner, inevitably I would quote, "great minds think alike." She taught me that there is a corollary: "...but fools rarely differ." The great challenge in life often isn't to agree with someone, no matter how smart; it is to determine if you are both great minds thinking alike, or both fools who are not differing.

2015 Sep 8

It's All About the White Rats

No, this is not about "White Hats" - security hackers who try to break into systems in order to strengthen them, as opposed to "Black Hats" - but really about what we can learn from white rats. In the last few weeks, I have helped solve a number of vexing problems on behalf of customers, both in technology and process. Each time I am asked how I do it, and each time the answer is the same.

2015 Sep 3

Blinded By The Textbook

With due respect to Manfred Mann's Earth Band, I just came across a great example of a business so blinded by their stale model that they cannot respond rationally to competitive threats: textbooks. Anyone involved in education, from students to professors to parents, knows that textbooks are exorbitant. There are several reasons for these prices: Market size: It is easier to sell 100MM Harry Potter hardcovers for $20 than a chemistry book that sells 20,000 copies.

2015 Sep 1

Don't Break Your Customers

Anyone who does Web-scale or information technology over the past two years knows containers. The primary reason is the success of docker in making not-so-new containers easy to build, deploy, manage and use. Personally, I think Docker containers are great. They provide a far more efficient level of isolation than VM virtualization, without sacrificing manageability. Docker itself, however, is a young company, and every now and then young companies, whose products are moving very quickly, make silly mistakes.

2015 Aug 27

Who Are You Going to Tell?

There is an old joke about a rabbi who goes golfing on Yom Kippur, although I am sure there are variants about an imam in ramadan or priest during Lent. It is such a beautiful day, and the rabbi never gets a chance on the links, so he skips synagogue and heads out. On the first hole, he swings... hole in one! He cannot believe it! He moves on to the second.