In-Depth

User story: At Fidelity

• By Jack Vaughan
• January 1, 2004

Nancy Landau of Fidelity Information Services, Boston, works in a world that others can only imagine. The leading mutual fund has a complete test bed that very nearly mirrors its actual operations, as described by Landau last fall at Gartner's AD Summit. She described her company's effort to have testers work more closely with enterprise monitoring teams to find process changes that could help bridge the gap between development and operations.

Landau described a production environment with more than 600 systems to monitor, and a very large test environment. Monitoring teams had a good handle on whether a physical box was up or down, but a less sure handle on whether an application was up or down. Given that the company had more than 300 servers in the test lab, management was inclined to ask what more the test people could do.

''Now we take people from assorted backgrounds -- testing, business, archictecture. When we have put a team together, we are looking at multiple aspects of how things work,'' she said.

Developing for deployment is still new. While only the largest operations can create such a lab, some lessons learned there can be shared. Her message to developers: ''Don't spam the event log.'' Often, Landau said, with no little understatement, a warning is better than a fatal error message.

Architectural walkthroughs are also useful. Such meetings allow operations to get server agents configured and activated much earlier in the process.

''Design consistent logging and reporting frameworks,'' she said, so messages are similar across applications. Track the use of error message dialogs, so developers know what is used, Landau added.

There is a lot of data management involved with bridging the development-deployment gap, she indicated. Thus, you have to filter through to what is truly important.

Please see the following related stories:
''Brave new performance management world'' by Jack Vaughan

''User story: At EBSCO'' by Rich Seeley