Short term implications: 

• Cost of development is higher.
• Transition is expensive – Other systems and processes are in a flux till the system is implemented and is more cumbersome for the users.

Long Term Implications:

• Maintenance Cost is higher – Running the business as well as modifications
• Complexity of the system, reduces life of software

• having an application that serves different types of requests.
• Quickly, re purposing the infrastructure to server different type of request.

Application based cloud: An application can be controlled by configuration parameters. By changing the parameters, the application serves different requests / purpose. This is challenging as older applications were not written keeping Cloud in mind. Too many parameters can complicate the application too.  

Re-purposing the infrastructure: This requires automating the provisioning process like imaging the servers, application deployment, configuring DNS, traffic management etc. This is easier to implement as this is just automating the manual steps.

All repetitive tasks must be automated for Efficient Execution / productivity and better quality (by reducing human errors) .

For a successful automation please do keep the following points in mind:

1. Standardize the process across the company
2. Break the process into smaller tasks
3. Define the input and output parameters for each task
4. Keep the automation simple
5. Do not provide the facility of overrides. Overrides and complicate the system.

To achieve 99.999% availability, we can only afford upto 8.76 hrs of downtime in an year. Urgency in identifying and resolving the issue is a key to achieving five 9s.

Knowing what’s going wrong with any system, at any given point of time is very important alongwith the co-relation of data coming from different systems.  Monitoring systems should provide actionable information to Operations engineers who are managing the datacenter 24/7/365. All the noise must be eliminated to save precious time, money and efforts.

Once an issue has been identified, an engineer must have all the diagnostic systems to find the root cause as soon as possible. After fixing the issue the monitoring system must be enhanced to catch the issue and run the fix automatically, if possible, eliminating the need for human intervention.

Standard / simple / single interface for monitoring or management dashboard for different equipments, would make it easier to use and eliminate the need for specialized engineers to handle different equipments in data center. All the regular maintenace tasks should be automated.

Strict Change Management policy: Any change must require the least amount of downtime and have a tested rollback plan. Changes, if possible, should be rolled out in phases, after approvals.

How can infrastructure affect the execution?

• Development of software is going through a series of steps. Any system that is part of the process can be a bottleneck
• Any / every manual interaction during the process can slow down the execution. Reduction of manual steps, speeds up the execution and reduces errors. Thus improving the speed of execution and quality of product.
• Consistent processes and tools, across a company, reduce the maintenance cost and increase the pace of execution.

All the above mentioned points affect the execution times and the quality of the output. Both of these affect the profits and growth of the company.

Automate as many manual / repetitive steps as possible and make a business efficient.

WEE provides custom solution to help businesses be more efficient.

Develop code

What does an organization expect from the developer?

Develop code at a faster pace

The process of developing code is a complicated process involving:

1. Understand requirements and Design
2. Develop code
3. Compile
4. QA
5. Release

Steps 1 and 2 are fun for the developer. Steps 3, 4 and 5 are not so fun. More seamless these steps are for the developer, more fun the environment is for him / her.

More than 50% of the time / resources are consumed by Steps 3, 4 and 5. So making these steps / processes efficient, directly impacts the developer productivity and reduces development cycle.

Efficient support systems help with the morale and focus of the developers (very expensive resources).

Process plays a very important part in an efficient execution. A good Process is easier to implement, maintain, consistent across the company and helps in faster execution. Process must be un-ambiguous with clearly defined criteria ( Input and output ) for each step.

Automation: Automation, not only speeds up execution, but also implements checks and balances to prevent mistakes / disasters.

Process is a sequence of steps that are implemented repetitively. Any steps that are executed repetitively can and must be automated for efficient execution.

Different steps / procedures are managed using different tools e.g feature requests are managed using project management tools, QA approvals are managed using Bug tracking system. For a seamless execution, Automation should take care of integration between all the systems, keeping manual intervention to minimal.

Automation Don’ts: Most of the times, automation is implemented using Cron jobs / Scheduled tasks. This is highly discouraged as the solution is not reliable / scalable, and requires a lot of maintenance.

Identifying and reducing in-efficiencies makes us efficient. Identifying in-efficiencies is the most important and toughest part. Most of the organizations fail in noticing those because

• Internal: Person trying to look for in-efficiencies is part of the same org for a long time. He / she is comfortable and accustomed with the working of the org.
• External: External organizations do not spend quality time in studying and analysing the environment. Thus being very conservative/ vague in their reports. The report is worded in such a way that it is left for interpretation.

At WEE, we do not cut corners in our study and analysis and are direct in our reports with proposed solutions.

There could be number of areas that are contributing to the in-efficiencies, such as

• Product definition
• Product Architecture
• SDLC Process
• Process engineering
• Supporting services ( IDE, Source Control, Build System, QA automation  etc.)
• Development team
• Management