Testing and Telephony
• Monday, October 10, 2011 - Carrier-grade, and not
Carrier-grade equipment is high reliability and high availability, and you just assume it is also high capacity, and high price to pay for all that. But there's another thing that goes along with carrier-grade equipment, and that's the customer staff that deals with it - typically experienced people with a lot of understanding of the technology and associated issues for that kind of gear.
Back in the early 90s, when I was getting my first introduction to systems being deployed into a telco's central offices, the provisioning interface for my product was none too pretty, and could have some problems if you handled it cluelessly. But that was OK, because the people using it were either technicans strictly following documented procedures, or senior staff who knew what they were doing. There would be a lot of detailed requirements for new products, but "easy to administer" just wasn't on the list. It didn't need to be, and customers wanted us to be spending engineering resources on making things good for the end-users. When we took a new product into customer labs for preliminary testing, they didn't just kick the tires, they gave it a good bashing, and gave it back with a detailed problem list - and then did the same for the next iteration. It was painful, but they helped us a lot. (There was one guy in particular who beat us up regularly, we feared him, and were grateful for the tough love.)
So in the way of technology development, systems originally developed for service providers and very large enterprises get downsized and made available for smaller and smaller enterprise networks, and that's a different ecosystem. The smaller the system, the more likely it is that the customer staff looking after it really needs it to be easy to administer. They may be very knowledgeable, but their attention is split among a lot of different equipment, and they don't have time to remember the quirks for any one thing. Or the whatever-it-is might be new technology to them, bought in hopes of fixing some specific local problem, so they don't know exactly how it needs to be set up.
When a company that has always made carrier-grade equipment starts going after that smaller-enterprise market, that's a cultural shift for Engineering. Now, some ease-of-use issues that Dev used to dismiss as "it's supposed to do that" become things that Test, and Support and Marketing, have to push back on as "no, really, guys, you gotta do something about that". Dev wants to do the right thing, but they're under pressure to get that code done, and they've become accustomed to thinking that ease-of-use doesn't matter all that much, so sometimes they need the reminder that "done" now includes a little more than it used to.
The in-progress cultural shift does make fitting in at a new company a little more complicated. I hope that being aware of it will help.
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