Work: Project Moves to Production

The (big, fancy, secret) project I work on moved to Production this week. The test cycle was a joke, but half a dozen people inside the company have been using it and I’ve been getting the feedback I need to keep the application free of bugs. So the site has launched and people can log into it, as soon as customers start signing up for it.

What made the test cycle a joke? We delivered to test on time, and the Test team just got their environment set up a week ago. So what have they been doing since 10/23? Trying in vain to configure a simple blade cluster that was already set up for Windows, SQL and IIS.

Yeah, the proprietary middleware we use took them five weeks to configure. I had to do the same configuration for our production servers, and it only took a week. The big difference? My week was before the Prod servers needed to be ready; Test’s five weeks were during the time when those servers were supposed to be used for testing. Ya can’t test without an environment; so what were they doing before?

Okay, that’s not really fair… Most of the middleware configuration in both environments was done by some guy in India - I guess I just pushed him five times as hard as the test lead did. I know the Production environment is harder to set up (DMZ, ACL, Firewalls, security sweeps, certifications, etc); so really, you’d think Test would get done faster. But the Indian didn’t really finish the job so I had to put the IIS filter in (Which is the root of the whole middleware system).

Meh; anyway, we’re in Prod - So cool for us. Now I can focus on the nothing I have to do for two weeks until we go into the next Analysis and Documentation phase. Hopefully I don’t get any more test and production support issues in the meantime; so I can finally enjoy some downtime.