

What if Enterprise IT built a race car? - mackross
https://www.scriptrock.com/blog/it-systems-cars-environment-configuration/

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ep103
I'm no longer convinced that this is a problem in our industry, so much as a
systematic characteristic of it.

People notice when a car performs badly. Its horrible to drive, and likely
will kill people.

Horribly written software, however, can be made to perform well under common
usage, even if it fails spectacularly for every single edge case. For most
edge case failures, chances are the user is going to be blamed, because most
likely, the user doesn't know the correct way to hold the mouse.

And the more endemic problems with horribly written software: maintenance, and
difficulty of upgrade, are both easily waved away by those making software
decisions from a business perspective. Difficulty of upgrading software is a
non-issue (assuming that business data is stored in a db somewhere, sanely),
it just becomes a business decision of when to completely replace their
current system with the best technology on the market 5 or 10 years from now.
And maintenance in the meanwhile is largely a non-issue if you don't plan on
steadily upgrading and improving your software, which really, most large
places simply don't. The C-level exec isn't the one using the software, and
really, as a result, many of them simply don't care.

If you look at it through that light, the IT process the OP describes makes
complete sense. Send in an architecture team that proposes the world to the
customer, and gets the largest possible contract signed. Send in developers,
and minimize cost everywhere, only actually deliver on things you know the
C-levels will check, because you know they won't check almost anything, and
they certainly won't care about a source code report. Then send in your QA
team, to make sure the company who built the software meets bare minimum
contractual obligations, and where they haven't, the customer won't notice.

... sigh

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scriptrockalan
Sadly enough I agree with this rather bleak assessment to a large degree. I
don't believe that we're truly stuck with it though. Why have Agile and DevOps
movements gained so much traction (hype)? For me it almost always comes down
to the need for better collaboration between silos. Architects shouldn't be
constrained unnecessarily by the mindset of devs or ops but if they are making
design decisions that can never be implemented then time is being wasted.
Wasted design time. Wasted processing time for the people handed it. And
wasted time coming up with workarounds. Efforts to eradicate this waste, even
in small amounts, are worthwhile and should be undertaken.

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mcintyre1994
What if Enterprise IT built a website? :) I'm getting a 504 gateway timeout. I
only mention it because it says "cloudflare" and the post hasn't received a
lot of attention so I assume it's not a traffic issue?

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stcredzero
Landkreuzer P. 1500

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landkreuzer_P._1500_Monster>

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zachrose
What if enterprise IT built software like an F1 racing team?

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leohutson
The software would be would be limited to 4 threads, have to use at least
500mb of memory, and be written in COBOL in order to be fair to other teams.

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gnu8
The space shuttle would be a better analogy.

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scriptrockalan
Truly frightening.

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DoubleCluster
That looks like normal software development to me. Enterprise IT just involves
more people, money and time.

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bluedino
Why a race car? Why not a 'regular' car? Just compare the Chevy Volt against
the Tesla Model S!

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scriptrockalan
The mechanics wouldn't necessarily be part of the same "team" as the rest of
the functions.

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lani
division of labour is passe. It's a thorn people have forgotten to remove

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zeroexzeroone
It would never ship, would be filled with bugs and someone along the lines
would switch the programming language AND the OS.

~~~
ericcumbee
And that often happens with Race Cars as well. the only difference is after a
while the manufacturer decides to cut the losses and mothball the program. See
the Aston Martin AMR1 or the Panoz LMP07 or the Lister LMP Le Mans Prototypes.

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gridscomputing
That's why I'm moving everything to The Cloud (TM)

