Steve's Seaside Life

Tagged: Desktop

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More Eating Your Own Dog Food And Daily Builds

I have just been reading an article on the importance of scheduling and bug and feature tracking in software projects.  Its a good article and worth a read, but its basic stuff really.  However its often the basic stuff that gets neglected so don’t dismiss it on that basis.  Anyway the article prompted me to think a bit more on the benefits of eating your own dogfood and regular/daily builds. 

The key thing I missed in the previous article was the importance of the process to managing compromise, and often that compromise takes the form of cutting or dropping features in order to deliver to time and budget.  The daily build/dogfood approach helps with this as follows:

  1. First it’s pretty key on all projects to put the basic platform elements in place first. These are the foundation elements upon which everything is built; they need to be the most reliable and therefore tested for the longest period.  They are also needed normally before any realistic dogfood environment can be created.  In my desktop example this basic building block would be a stable system image, with a core set of applications.

  2. From that point onwards you are into the features management game.  Using …

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Daily Builds Applied To Systems Integration Projects.

The last post has got me thinking more about the whole concept of daily builds.  I mentioned in passing that the concept is not just applicable to software development but I did not explain the comment.  I went out for a walk and started to think through how the concept could be applied to a systems integration project.  The one I chose is quite topical for me at the moment, a Windows XP desktop refresh and desktop management project.

 

So first let’s look at some characteristics of this sort of project:

 

  1. A standard system image that needs to be deployed tens of thousands of times to many different types of hardware

  2. The need to deploy thousands of applications on top of this standard system image, and to deploy these applications hundreds or thousands of times

  3. The need to access seamlessly thousands of file, print, authentication, management and application servers

  4. An environment that tens of thousands of users will use for perhaps 2-3 hours a day on average, this means hundreds of millions of pounds of deliverables depend on its usability and reliability

 

So let’s look at the daily, (or perhaps regular), build process and …

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Eating Your Own Dog Food.

Joel, writes up an interesting example of NOT eating your own dog food, (ie using the IT solutions you are developing yourself), until it was almost too late:

Eating your own dog food is the quaint name that we in the computer industry give to the process of actually using your own product. I had forgotten how well it worked, until a month ago, I took home a build of CityDesk (thinking it was about 3 weeks from shipping) and tried to build a site with it.

Phew! There were a few bugs that literally made it impossible for me to proceed, so I had to fix those before I could even continue. All the testing we did, meticulously pulling down every menu and seeing if it worked right, didn’t uncover the showstoppers that made it impossible to do what the product was intended to allow. Trying to use the product, as a customer would, found these showstoppers in a minute.

And not just those. As I worked, not even exercising the features, just quietly trying to build a simple site, I found 45 bugs on one Sunday afternoon. And I am a lazy man, I couldn’t have spent more …

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Credit Suisse – Case Study Note

Delivered by Steve Maytum – VP – End user platforms Today 54,000 managed XP desktop, two builds.  Modified the Gina to add a “borrow” button to RDP to a CPS environment or RDP to the users desktop PC,  this is similar to what CSC have done, but my modifying the...

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Citrix Apollo Demo

XenDesktop running Vista Client is running XPe Showed AutoCad, great 3D model rotation using 5mb/sec Vista 3D flip worked fine WPF 3D app – patient records system – worked fine Call of duty game – worked ok Full screen video worked well too Still working on high quality audio Works...

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Notes on iForum NetScaler

The network load balancer is going through a period of change The concept of a load balancer is still relevant However load balancers need to do more to earn their living, reducing cost, increasing security and optimising traffic The load balancer of the future is best thought of as an...

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iForum session Desktop Virtualization – is it hype?

Delivered by Sumit Dhawan – Senior Director – Desktop Virtualization Group Key points: Current desktop process is slow, complex, insecure and costly to maintain Task workers 30%, Office workers 55%, Mobile workers 15% Office workers seems to me to be way to broad a classification Office workers are characterised as...

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A few thoughts on the iForum Keynote

These are the key things that I took away from the iForum keynote by : Mark Templeton at Edinburgh. It’s started late! 1 Million Citrix servers currently in operation, in 200,000 companies Citrix NetScaler sits in front of many large scale web sites today, 75% of Internet users touch NetScaler...

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Key questions for VDI

I’ve been trying to work through the key questions that need to be answered about VDI by anyone comparing it to the obvious alternatives, these being: A laptop A physical desktop A client side virtual machine, copied or streamed to the PC A web application portal A server hosted desktop...