Technology , Outages , Bugs and Us

No matter what you do... there is nothing called as full automation...
One manual error and you are gone for life.... Over the last few weeks
some good effort from the Team we have successfully being able to get
rid of the eclipse to our code... Yes we got rid of conflicting ORM
technologies in our code, upgraded and migrated our self to the best
one that works...

However its not easy... technology is predictive and so are the bugs
it holds, in 2 spells we have had severe troubles. Locks , Lock
contentions , Dead locks... pulling of people from critical tasks to
let our customers use our systems, Sleepless nights debugging the
locks and the SQL behind them, debugging the code , 1 , 2, 3 several
times... , Seeking experts every now and then..

I am sure you face this, If you are a technology team every now and
then. We learn our lessons and we become more effective , more
precautionary...But is it enough?

Well No... you need to bring Caution and Precaution in the Team. Bring
a Pessimistic QA and an optimistic developer in your tasks and maybe
it will work.. Here are few things that can take you at ease when you
are in such situations...

1. Bring a Policeman in your Team, He should not be the tech Lead, Not
the Architect.. he should be one who knows a bit of technology and
asks you why a certain line of code is checked in.

2. When in troubles take Baby steps... You can change the whole world
in one day and You can change yourself to match the world in a day...
Dont try to do either.. slow down.. take step 1 watch , step 2 wait ,
step 3 snooze and step 4 wake up...

3. Relax... just hard work is not enough , you have to be creative in
finding problems

4. Do not listen to your Sales Team nor your developers.... Both go to
extremes... One wants to do everything with Technology and immediately
the other wants everything immediately...both hurt in problem
situations

5. Bring a Semi expert , Non Expert and one expert in a loop and see whats on

6. List down areas , check them out to find the issue...

while I write this I think about it... Am I going to go tomorrow and
follow this the next time we have trouble?

Hell Yes