Too busy to read?

Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful 'itties.

We're still struggling on how to prioritize our own seventy-three internal projects," she says, her expression turning glum. "There's still way too many. We've spent weeks with all the team leads trying to establish some sort of relative importance level, but that's all we've done. Argue." She flips to the second page. "The projects seem to fall into the following categories: replacing fragile infrastructure, vendor upgrades, or supporting some internal business requirement. The rest are a hodgepodge of audit and security work, data center upgrade work, and so forth."

Because of our ever-improving production monitoring of the infrastructure and applications, more often than not, we know about the incidents before the business does.

"It's like the free puppy," I continue. "It's not the upfront capital that kills you, it's the operations and maintenance on the back end." Chris cracks up. "Yes, exactly! They'll say, 'The puppy can't quite do everything we need. Can you train it to fly airplanes? It's just a simple matter of coding, right?'"

"Let's use the example of configuring a server. It involves procurement, installing the os and applications on it according to some specification, and then getting it racked and stacked. Then we validate that it's been built correctly. Each of these steps are typically done by different people. Maybe each step is like a work center, each with its own machines, methods, men, and measures."