Comment Methodology vs. Reality (Score 1) 163
My experience has been that an awful lot of shops try to use a canned methodology to compensate for the fact that they don't have good people. This simply never works. Having tons of documentation describing how your systems differ from a vendor-supplied baseline, what steps to go through to install something new, how you're going to test the changes, etc, etc, etc, is useless if the people doing the work aren't competent. They'll still find a way to fsck it up.
No amount of testing will save you if the tests aren't performed by people qualified to interpret the results and as QA systems often differ from production ones, there is no substitute for having sysadmins who have a solid understanding of what's going on.
I've been in several shops that have attempted to adapt software development lifecycle practices to system administration. The most common result is a bunch of documentation requirements that slow operational processes down to a crawl and don't end up increasing their reliability. A more productive approach would be to hire top-flight sysadmins and to invest in QA systems that accurately reproduce operational conditions, so that the testing is meaningful. Why is this done so infrequently? Because it costs money and can't be accomplished by management fiat.
No amount of testing will save you if the tests aren't performed by people qualified to interpret the results and as QA systems often differ from production ones, there is no substitute for having sysadmins who have a solid understanding of what's going on.
I've been in several shops that have attempted to adapt software development lifecycle practices to system administration. The most common result is a bunch of documentation requirements that slow operational processes down to a crawl and don't end up increasing their reliability. A more productive approach would be to hire top-flight sysadmins and to invest in QA systems that accurately reproduce operational conditions, so that the testing is meaningful. Why is this done so infrequently? Because it costs money and can't be accomplished by management fiat.
