Thinking Inside a Bigger Box

I often criticize products from the big vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle for what I call the “New Coke Effect”. As retold by Malcom Gladwell in Blink, Pepsi introduced blind taste tests in the 80s. They beat Coca Cola by a big margin. In order to regain the advantage, Coke developed “New Coke”, a product that was optimized for the blind taste tests. It tanked. Totally. It tanked so bad that coke had to have the words “classic coke” prominently on the label until 2002.

The problem is that a blind taste test is not the same as drinking a whole bottle. People prefer sweet tastes when they just take a sip, but not when they want to finish the glass.

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I finally managed to finish my article on testing web applications with JWebUnit and Jetty. The article is published on java.net as last Thursday’s featured article. Enjoy!

WordPress has not been good to me lately. For some reason, this site loads really, really slow now, and I’m still trying to figure out why. If you know why WordPress may be misbehaving, please let me know.

Until I fix the problem: All pages on the site still load, just give them some time…

There’s one question you really should be able to answer about your software project, whether you’re a project manager, a tester, an architect or a developer: “How are we going to put this safely into production and get it out again if we need to?” I think this is what Configuration Management tries to answer, but it gets bogged down in so many details that I’ve never been able to say that I’m able to understand what configuration management is. I think many “configuration management people” like to perpetuate the myth of “you don’t understand what configuration management is, so don’t even try.” As getting software into and out of production is a question of vital importance to everyone working with it, I think this is a really bad situation.

How do we answer the question, then?

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