A big project starts with a small plan

• •  
  • Presentation speakers
    • Marco Marongiu, Senior System Administrator, Opera Software ASA
  • Download presentation
    • a_big_project_starts_with_a_small_plan.pdf

  Sad experiences with badly designed systems make us believe that we should always “think big” when planning new solutions. However, blurry specifications, solo projects, tight time constraints should always point us to simpler, expandable solutions. True stories will show us how this principle wins against established misbelief (Perl, Puppet and CFEngine included).

  In the scope of this talk, “think big” is the habit to design a system that satisfies current and future requirements, so that it doesn’t get obsolete in a few months; fits the project it was designed for, and possibly more future ones.

  Frustrated by badly designed systems, we develop the habit to always think big, in anger. Stop, calm down, and think through it: is “think big” the best solution, always?

  Story one: when “think big” is the solution: A real story about B2B reports, where resources (mainly time) allowed to learn-by-doing, then scrap everything and redo the project correctly. The result was then used in other projects as well.

  Story two: when “think big” is impossible: A real story about the migration of a set of email systems in the public sector in Italy. There, designing with clarity in mind helped other people, nearly two years later, to extend the functionality of the system beyond the scope of the initial requirements. And with little knowledge of the programming language involved.

  Story three: the perfect infrastructure parable: A real story about a configuration management system, where “think big” lead to a huge failure, waste of time, frustration and loneliness; and where the same project was restarted smaller and simpler, and it took off.

  Attending this seminar, people will get some distilled experience that will help them to drive their future developments.

 

Related Presentations

 

Kanban for Portfolio Management

• Gaetano Mazzanti

Migrating to LibreOffice

• Italo Vignoli

Infrastructure as data with Ansible for easier Continuous Delivery

• Carlo Bonamico

From Problem to Solution. Faster: Using Interviews to Improve your Process and Accelerate Delivery

• Melissa Doerken

Introduction to Percona XtraDB Cluster

• Frédéric Descamps

Raise The Bar!

• Alessandro Franceschi