these days are hard days for software consultants. the customer wants a quick launch of his new web 2.0 app, which mostly consists of badly defined business requirements. you can tell the customer over and over again, that well defined requirements are the keys for success ..
in my opinion the most important missing defined processes are offline processes in after-sales and marketing.
but their investors are yelling .. “profit” .. “product launch” .. “benefits” ..
i am yelling “requirements” .. “requirements” .. “requirements” ..
these days the customer says, that he knows, how much time your team needs to implement a feature. but he isnt aware of all backend issues .. what requests and systems are necessary to implement the feature ..
as consultant you get a requirement that sounds like “handle 2000 current users” .. this requirement will trace an explosion of testing and refactoring .. you need to simulate the load and make sure, that all works fine and all services are up and running .. you need to handel a huge amount of refactoring and testing .. but this takes time and MONEY ..
you tell the customer, that you need xxx days to implement the features .. the customer says to you “i know that it only take you xx days, so i only will pay xx days” .. ok ..
you tell the customer, that you can implement the feature in xx days, but you are not aware, that it scales .. it will works, but you can not make sure, that it will also work with the load, he wants to serve ..
the customer says “ok, do it, i chancel this requirement”, because he does not believe, that thats what you say is the truth .. but who has more experiences in development ? the “3 years ago graduated Master of Business Administration”-guy or the “having 15 years of consulting/development experiences in multi-user/tier-systems working for IBM, SIEMENS, PwC”-guy .. ???
so the teams starts to implemented the features .. all worked well .. but after 14 months of runtime the customer comes back and he told me, that the system does not work .. user requests are slow .. they lose sales ..
mh .. i am little bit frustrated about that .. here are some other opinions about scaling and stuff i collect over the years ..
The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture.
However, the lack of planning for scale is a clear sign that we are living in a “built to flip” age. No one, is thinking (or planning) about long term business models!
During a bubble, attention to boring details like capacity planning, infrastructure management, security, etc… sometimes take a back seat to new feature introduction. Those, however, are a substantial portion of what makes a company survive.
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