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IT World
E-Business in the Enterprise – July 08, 2003
Manuals, conversations and RSS
By Sean Mc Grath
At the moment I am re-emerging from a long session of a well known IT adventure game known as "catch the randomly recurring problem in the mission critical system".
Step one in fixing any IT problem is the creation of a test "harness" which can be used to repeatedly re-create the problem. Once that is in place, standard scientific methodology takes over. Change things one at a time until the problem goes away. All other things being equal, the last thing changed is the source of your problem.
The more distributed, complex and multi-cellular our IT systems become, the harder it is to create these test harnesses. On numerous occasions during the debug cycle, I found myself on the Web, chasing down error messages, reading manuals, reading postings from other developers. Actually, mostly reading postings from other developers.
Looking back on it, I think it is fair to say that I would not have solved the problem without the Web. A strong statement I think you will agree. A statement that begs the question: "what did we do before the Web? How did complex systems get debugged without it?"
Well, we did. Just as our forefathers survived without antibiotics, television, Kinkos and chocolate brownies, so too developers of yesteryear survived without the Web.
I don't think we build systems any better these days than we used to mind you. It is just that now, thanks to the Web, we have a higher threshold before we hit information asphyxiation - the point at which progress is impossible without more information.
These days, thanks to the Web, we have a lot more access to stuff which means, in turn that we use a lot more stuff. Which, in turn means we need yet more access to stuff. Vicious circle or progress? You choose.
Personally, I doubt that it would be possible to, say, build a complex J2EE based system just using the vendor manuals and without using the Web. The higher information threshold it provides has become an indispensable tool.
I'm not happy with the word 'information' as I have used in here. The Web certainly provides raw information in abundance but I think the critical thing it provides to IT practitioners these days is access to conversations - not merely raw information. Conversations which, for the most part, take place from consumer to consumer. Developers talk to each other, exchange questions and answers. Theories and snake oil solutions go to and fro. They talk, the rest of us listen.
Returning to my marathon debugging session, here is a rough calculation of where I spent my debugging time:
Vendor manuals: 10%
Googling: 20% Reading developer blogs, user mailing lists etc.: 70%
Note the very low percentage of time using the "official" resources from the vendors of the applications involved.
I solved my problem, not by reading the manual but by lurking in, and later participating in an electronic conversation about the vendor's software. A conversation created by consumers.
By coincidence, a UPS parcel arrived today containing a manual for a vendor's product which happens to be part of system I was debugging last week. After a quick flick, I threw it in the bin. Why? Because it contained no useful information that I could not find in more accurate, more to-the-point form on the Web by reading what other consumers are saying about the software.
The 70% figure above can roughly be broken down further like this:
RSS feeds: 20%
RSS-only search engines: 20% Blog surfing: 30%
You are probably surprised how big a role Weblogs and RSS had to play in my adventures. Me too. As a result of my travels, I now have an excellent collection of new RSS feeds in my aggregator that keep me tuned in to ongoing developer conversations about the stuff I was debugging.
Pretty soon now, I predict we will be asking the question "how did we every debug software without access to weblogs and RSS feeds?"