Coheed, Coheed, Coheed

If you've ever had the chance to see a Coheed and Cambria show, then you know the chant I'm talking about.

I didn't think I was going to make it, but somehow the stars aligned and I caught the Coheed and Cambria show at Northern Lights last night... wow! They are on a short warm up tour as they get ready to support the release of Year Of The Black Rainbow (officially comes out in a few weeks). Really, looking forward to the release... even more so after hearing a few tracks last night. I thought Claudio's vocals sounded better then ever, Pennie's drumming was amazing, and Travis and Michael were as solid as ever.

Picture this... still in a meeting, in Manhattan at 630pm... all but wrote off being able to catch the show. Ran for the 7:00pm train. Got into Albany at 9:45. Doors opened at the show at 8, but still no text from Jordan that CO&CA went on yet, so I'm beginning to get a glimmer of hope. Drive to the Northern Lights venue. No parking left. Finally find a place way out back... make it inside in time to catch the beginning of the show. I love it when a plan comes together like that!

The hospital metaphor

In the Google Testing blog last month, James A. Whittaker introduced a pretty interesting look at testing using a metaphor of hospital/medical practices versus the traditional manufacturing one: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2010/02/testing-in-data-center-manufacturing-no.html

Here is a quote from the article about the life of a tester: "In our father's software and Deming's model we talk about quality control and quality assurance while we play the role of inspector. In contrast, my job seems much more like that of an attending physician. In fact, a medical analogy gives us some interesting parallels to think about software testing. A physician's hospital is our data center, there is always activity and many things are happening in parallel. Physicians have patients; we have applications and features. Their medical devices are our infrastructure and tools. I can picture my application's features strewn across the data center in little virtual hospital beds."


While I had never explicitly made this analogy before reading this, it seems to fit with my current perspectives. When I first started thinking about the team organization for the recent startup that I was involved with, the first position I hired was that which I had an easy time picking, but a tough time naming; a hybrid of a testing, QA, product specialist, release specialist,  coordinator... all rolled into one. Eventually, as the business grew, I knew that specific areas of this person's responsibilities would be filled by multiple people. I knew immediately who I wanted for this position, and that it was the first most important role I needed to fill but I didn't know what title to give her. I'm still not sure what the best title is for this person, but I now have an analogy for the environment I was trying to create to foster our software's success ... and that was more of a hospital, and less of a manufacturing plant. Therefore, who I hired first was a hospital administrator.

I knew that as we brought on developers we would have various feature branches being worked on simultaneously. Sadly, some of these feature branches might not ever see production. Following on the idea that software is "grown" not "built", not all of these feature branches were even all that well described before being birthed. But, in order to have a hope of someday growing to reach production, they would need a hospital bed, an attending staff to watch over vitals, care for their needs, attending physicians to diagnose issues and coordinate treatment, and surgeons to remove disease and problem areas. It takes a lot of coordination, effort and loving care to keep these projects on a road to production. And a hospital administrator is this coordination glue.

I've worked in a lot of different software development environments. I've seen environments where there is no hospital, and the little software feature branches get pushed out of the nest right from birth to production. I've seen environments that have testing and QA labs, but the entire department is considered entry level. Would you want to put your child's care in a hospital that was considered full of "entry level" people? I think the traditional manufacturing analogy breads some of this thought; regardless if it really fits with real manufacturing QA and testing. 


The old manufacturing analogy makes us think that testing is part of an assembly line. Things are built and assembled at one point on the line, and then tested at another point, and then shipped at another, etc. It also makes us think that because its part of an assembly line, people can quickly be trained to do specific tests repeatedly over and over as the product passes through. However, software doesn't just pass through like parts. Software is much more of an organic thing and its success depends upon environments that foster organic health. As James suggest in the article, "Software isn't so much built as it is grown. "


I think the hospital metaphor fits much better then the manufacturing one because of the organic nature of software. I like how James describes his role of a tester as more akin to that of an attending physician. I like how the hospital metaphor helps me better quantify this "hospital administrator" role that I've been finding so important in today's software development lifecycle. It also helps me identify some of the missing pieces in many software development environments that I've been part of. There is one particular piece to the puzzle that the hospital metaphor fills in nicely (in addition to the hospital administrator) that has been on my mind a lot lately. But, I'll let the overall hospital metaphor take shape for a few days and say more about that other idea next.

TekServ nyc rocks!

Warning... here is the spoiler:

Thank you TekServ! Thank you for being fair. Thank you for being honest. 

Here is the long winded version:

It had all the makings of a bad day. Get on the train for a 2 1/2 hour commute from Albany to Manhattan. A few minutes into the ride take out my trusty MacBook Pro. No hard drive found. Won't boot. No warnings. No clicking. No slow painful death. Just no hard drive. Had a Snow Leopard dvd in my bag. Boot up. Go to utilities. No Hard drive. Damn. 

First thought...am I backed up. Yes. I'm good there. Not a perfect Time capsule type approach... but more of a developer in the cloud approach... After the last drive crash a few years ago everything I do now is hybrid work local, synch with the cloud... between DropBox account, Github, and IMAP mail, I'm almost plug and play anywhere and everywhere.

Second thought... what is my plan of attack to get it fixed and be able to actually make some money writing software today? Is that possible? Should I get off the train at the next stop, head back home, or continue. I choose continue on and see if I could at least salvage part of the day.

So, take out my phone and look for Apple repair in the city. OK, Apple store on 14th street. Get off the train, stop quick at the office, then hale a cab. As is the case in most Apple stores, I'm quickly greeted and welcomed. I made a Genius appointment open arriving, but it wasn't until 1:30pm, and it was currently 10am. Actually not bad in the realm of things... but my goal was to see if I could actually get some work in before the day was done. As I was talking with one of the associates about trying to see if I can get bumped up if somebody doesn't show, etc. He suggested that I might want to try TekServ,  a few blocks up on 23rd street. He said that they do a pretty good job with walk-in's. I took his advice.

What a cool store! Not in the ultra modern glass white, clean, uncluttered Apple store cool...but more of friendly sci-fi hackers garage cool! 

They were very geared towards handling walk-in slobs like myself. It sure must get tiresome on the other end of people like me walking in expecting the world to stop to help with my problem, now, today. But, they never made me feel like I was that common every day guy with a problem. I walked in and was promptly greeted before making it fully into the store: ~"Hi, how can I help you?" "My MacBook needs some help today so I can get back to making money" "Ok. Here is a ticket" And he pushes down on an old fashion mechanical device, and punches out a ticket for me. Number 28. "Just head back to where it says "MacBook Pro" and your number will be called shortly. "Ok. Cool. Thanks"

I head back to the waiting area, and look up at the ticket screens. A couple of classic circa 1984 Macintosh computers hung over the work area. Simply displaying the next ticket number for service. Cool! OK, number 24, I have 28. That doesn't seem too bad but you never know. I look around the cool store for a bit, then have a seat and look up at 26. Not bad. It was about 1/2 hour when my number was called. 

I explained my situation to a very friendly technician. "Dude, I know that you must hear this all day... but I really don't think my hard drive has crashed." "I know that is the easy answer. The expected answer" "But I'm not saying it because I don't want it to be, but because I really don't think it is." He then asked, well what's happening. It was tough to to tell him about the system folder with the question mark, and not expect him to think I was nuts about not thinking that the hard drive crashed. But he listened. He booted off a network drive. We didn't see the hard drive. "As bad as that seems, I really don't think it crashed... its just gone." I say unconvincingly. 

We decided to plan for the worse and be prepared to put a new hard drive in. Unfortunately, despite being under warranty, I couldn't allow for the usual swap the hard drive and send my dead one back to Apple. While I go out of my way to prevent sensitive data from ever getting on to my laptop, I also don't ever want to be asked by a past client, if a hard drive that I ever used while working for them went somewhere without me physically taking part in the destruction of said drive. Call me super paranoid... but I think I owe that to all my clients... and some actually demand it. So, I picked out and purchased a new drive to be installed in case they open it up and find it really does need a new one... and I forgo the warranty.  

I went and grabbed lunch and a coffee. At 1:30 (when my original appointment at the Apple store was only scheduled to start), I got a call from a technician from TekServ. She informed me that she had some good news for me. Somehow the flex cable came loose on the board end, and after securing it, things appeared to be booting up fine! Completely under warranty. Completely fixed without a hard drive replacement. Unless I still wanted to have the new drive installed they would reverse the charge on my card.

This kind of service just doesn't happen often enough in today's world. It would have been so easy for them to put in the drive, which I already paid for, tighten all the cables when it still didn't boot, and I would have never been the wiser. 

Thank you TekServ! Thank you for being fair. Thank you for being honest. 

What started as a painful day, ended as a pleasant reminder that there are good folks doing good business, and that feels good.

morning commute

I've been making this morning train commute for months... but the view of the Catskills reflecting on the Hudson in the early morning just never gets old (taken with my iPhone through an Amtrak window).