Going Green!

There’s a lot of buzz about encouraging and enlightening people about the difference they can make with small things to the world, especially on leaving the carbon foot print. But, have you observed we lag in doing the small things some of which hardly take a fraction of second.

My observations of very simple things that can make a difference are:

Taking printouts: I don’t know why we have to print so much of stuff when we have the amazing facilities on the computer for better reading! We are the one’s trying to move the world to a “paperless world” and the see the print usage of any IT organization. They put the computer revolution to shame! What are we teaching the world? To be a hypocrite?

Power usage: It is said that the monitors and the CPUs are the main consumers of the power on a workstation. Is it so difficult to switch off the monitor when we are going for a break and then switch it on when we come back? I can understand that switching the CPU off every evening may not be a good idea for us. But switching the monitor off, hardly takes a second! Just do a parade of the office, in the evening, and you will see most of the monitors with a message “Please switch off the monitor when not in use”!

If we can’t do such simple things, (obviously, because we don’t understand their importance), how capable are we to understand the big difference we can make to the Go-Green campaign?

Agile and Performance

Most of the people executing projects using Agile process consider that the requirements can be changed and incorporated anytime till the last day of release to Production/Live systems. It is very difficult to drive that Agile has a process and certain parameters are to be base-lined and fixed.

With such an interpretation of the process, the project suffers. There is no sufficient time for Design and Architecture, the implementation and for testing. The problems start surfacing when the project is released to higher environments specially commissioned live.

Teams - Development or Testing would have received very less time to do their activities and are hurried up. Result? Hardly, to anyone’s surprise, the deliverables are of poor quality and everything aftermath is a show stopper production issue.

Once the application becomes a little stable (i.e., when the showstoppers are reduced), the users will realise how slow the system is. It flows down the hierarchy and comes to the development team as though they have to cut their heads-off for blunders committed.

When the root cause analysis for the performance is done, it is the fairly obvious reasons that come out as findings. A few reasons are like:
The Architecture and Design processes are mostly ignored. Of course, tactical solutions are meant for that reason!
Development team was rushed through with no time to use common components or to check if something has been re-written nth time
No time for code reviews and even if someone dares to do it, there’s no time to fix it
The environments are not tuned and configured according to production standards. When were given the time to do it, at the first place?

I understand that we are in a short cut world. We want everything at fingertips. But it doesn’t mean that projects also will be executed at that pace, whatever new process applied. Agile is great, but only when used properly. And for that matter, it applies on any process.