1969 Visibility, Part 6 - the search tool

Sunday, August 24, 2008

At the end of the compatibility project (previous post) we had a lot of "design approved" external incompatibilities which may or may not adversely affect customer applications and automated procedures, but no one had any idea which were serious. No one had any idea what the customer actually depended on (which in my opinion they should have known BEFORE deciding which ones would be allowed).

When I took incompatibilities to Peter's group, I wanted to be able to argue for or against them with some idea of the impact. So I wrote a search tool, that would scan applications and procedures for use of those particular commands or response texts. It was slow and cumbersome, and produced reams of output, very little of which was actually useful, but it was sufficient for my needs, because I knew exactly what I was looking for. I obtained actual applications and procedures from other installations within the company, who pretty much replicated customer usage, and got a pretty good idea of an incompatibility's impact.

Peter's design department was charged with writing a guide for customers, so they'd know what to expect, what they'd probably have to watch out for or change when they ported to the new operating system.

Somebody, somewhere, somehow, decided that my scanner should be released to the customers. Somebody came up with the description "automated identification of incompatibilities", and it sounded good.

I argued strongly against it. It's too slow. It's too cumbersome. It puts out too much useless information. It's just for my own use, I never expected anyone else to use it. There's no documentation with it. Hey folks, it's really REALLY bad! I really don't want my name associated with this dog.

It was released anyway, on the recommendation of Peter's group. With my name on it. Because they didn't want to do the work and they thought this was the easy way out.

And then the customer reviews started coming in.
We can't figure out how to use it.
It's too cumbersome.
It's too slow.
There's too much useless information that must be sifted by hand.
There are too many false hits.
This is a piece of garbage.
... and on and on, from every customer who received it.

And my name was on the damn thing. Product-wide visibility.

Sorry, Peter, but this didn't make up for the other thing....

But thanks a lot anyway.
.