3 ms·

So the silver bullet is to reduce the cost of failure? So that you can allow failure, which seems to be a necessary requirement for fast iteration and hence fas

by jbert 17y ago

So the silver bullet is to reduce the cost of failure? So that you can allow failure, which seems to be a necessary requirement for fast iteration and hence fast development? i.e. the hard thing to do is to find a way to slice off 5 or 10% of the problem space so you can have a fast-iterating pilot system which can be a little flakey. As it beds down into maturity after it's period of rapid development (and higher-than-acceptable downtime), the new system can then be rolled out to the wider audience. So the trick is to designate an "early adopter" section of your enterprise (maybe one branch office), give them a free reign and then scale their good solutions enterprise-wide.

Hoff 17y ago
The easy stuff usually gets sliced off and dealt with. The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb. When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not. These servers and clusters are very different than what most folks are accustomed to dealing with; vastly larger servers, application environments, communications, storage. And unfortunately for upgrades and migrations and incremental work, usually also involving (often fragile and ill-documented and poorly understood) interconnections all over the place. And critical.
- sailormoon 17y ago
  The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb. No-one's saying they're dumb. They're saying they're Doing It Wrong. And the things you're talking about - banks and stock - are edge cases of the enterprise world. I would actually argue that most stock markets are actually very well implemented. Banks usually have competent IT too, since IT is a core competency of theirs. These are edge cases though; most corporate IT is orders of magnitude less sexy than real time trading systems.
- jbert 17y ago
  > When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not. But you might find that there is one stock market with a smaller trade volume than the others. Or one of the 50 hospitals in your district is smaller. If you can peel off a bunch of "early adopters" and make them guinea pigs, you can get some of the benefits of rapid development. You either need the buy in of the early adopters or be able to push them around. This happens all the time. The UK used to test their laws on the Scots before rolling them out to the rest of the country.

by jbert 17y ago

Hoff 17y ago

The easy stuff usually gets sliced off and dealt with. The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb. When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not. These servers and clusters are very different than what most folks are accustomed to dealing with; vastly larger servers, application environments, communications, storage. And unfortunately for upgrades and migrations and incremental work, usually also involving (often fragile and ill-documented and poorly understood) interconnections all over the place. And critical.

sailormoon 17y ago
The folks working on these boxes are Not Dumb. No-one's saying they're dumb. They're saying they're Doing It Wrong. And the things you're talking about - banks and stock - are edge cases of the enterprise world. I would actually argue that most stock markets are actually very well implemented. Banks usually have competent IT too, since IT is a core competency of theirs. These are edge cases though; most corporate IT is orders of magnitude less sexy than real time trading systems.
jbert 17y ago
> When you're dealing with financial transactions or stock trading or with medical records, you're either able to deal with the fire hose of data, or with the uptime requirements, or the scale of the data. Or not. But you might find that there is one stock market with a smaller trade volume than the others. Or one of the 50 hospitals in your district is smaller. If you can peel off a bunch of "early adopters" and make them guinea pigs, you can get some of the benefits of rapid development. You either need the buy in of the early adopters or be able to push them around. This happens all the time. The UK used to test their laws on the Scots before rolling them out to the rest of the country.