IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Software issues? Consider the source.

July 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Software issues? Consider the source.

TAGS: Open Source

Software reflects the organization. The culture of a business vertical, the culture of the company doing the business, and the culture of the software engineering department within the company materially affect how software is designed, written, tested, deployed and maintained. Where software is involved, paying attention to the culture is absolutely critical.

Software is only as good as how it works within its production environment. One of the advantages of Open Source is its broader community with lots of feedback for how it functions in various environments with various users. Open Source engineers code defensively because they know their community, know they will need to provide enabling access to users and other programmers who will fit the project into their own needs. They know there is huge advantage to working together. Open Source projects are not successful if they are myopic. They have to be collaborative. This is in contrast to a "my way or the highway" attitude embedded into the big 4 monitoring tools.

What prompted me about this was kind of surprise. I was talking to a buddy at another small software company who was moaning about how hard it was to get his IT search engine tool to get logs from CA Unicenter. Sounds simple enough, but he spent 3 weeks back and forth with CA support trying to use the CA interface that would provide the logs and never got it fully working. My buddy is strong with the force technically. His product is a Java / Apache stack and promiscuous in its ability to pull data from logs, ports, etc. CA support tried hard to help him, they were great, but he couldn't get what he needed from Unicenter. What's up with that?

Posted by Harper Mann on July 16, 2007 05:11 PM

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