Dealing with development constraints in customer policy
As described above, I work in IT Consulting and transition to different client environments . It's natural to come across a variety of security policies, and in most cases we had to go through a security checklist before authorizing our laptops - our mobile development workstations - to connect to their network (most of the time, development network only).
There is a client that does not allow external computers to connect to their network, so our laptops are ... expensive communication computers with GSM mobile modems. We are forced to use their desktop PCs for development, and these workstations are pretty old models with low RAM and single core Pentium 4 processors and cranks. Needless to say, development work isn't optimal, especially when dealing with Visual Studio solutions, which can range from 100 to 400 projects.
For small cases that can be isolated, we design and test our own laptops. But for large cases, given that some development servers such as SeeBeyond and DB2 mainframe databases are only online and the prospect of copying hundreds of projects back and forth across machines is dire, this doesn't sound like a technically sound idea.
I am not asking for tricks that violate client rules (for example, connect the laptop to the masquerade MAC address of the desktop). I just love to know that others have tried to maintain some of their advantages and efficiency with their own hardware when working in such environments. Whenever I can try to duplicate the environment with virtual servers on my own laptop, but it still only works with Microsoft server solutions. Server virtualization and non-Microsoft software is a problem.
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Write a worthy suggestion to your manager about anything you can do to fix the decision. If he is unwilling or unable to solve the problem or does not want / cannot convey the proposal to whoever can, I would say that the current situation is what they decided to use.
In this case, either live with him or not, i.e. move on.
The offer must contain:
- Suggestion of what you want to do
- Why this should be done
- The consequences of this
- And most importantly, the consequences don't
List things like longer development time or less testing or less time to write quality code. Basically, a minor upgrade that doesn't cost much will greatly improve the quality of the product.
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It's hard. The main reason here is management that does not understand that there are real consequences for their choices in the environment.
Your problem is that while you can be paid by the hour, you probably are not getting paid that way, so your wasted money ends up in your boss's pockets, not you. This is often a mild conflict of interest. Your company has zero incentive to speed up your work, and your client is reluctant to invest in infrastructure in what they see as temporary involvement.
All I can say is that you have to control this flagpole with control. You have to show them that this is happening in real time from projects that could jeopardize your delivery times, or worse, the reliability of these machines is such that it also compromises the delivery of the final product. The burden is up to you to make your leadership a believer.
The RAM giant at Crucial is thirty bucks. If no one wants to shell out 90 big for 3GB of RAM for your box, you have a guide that actively works against you or doesn't respect you. If it comes down to it, you're in big trouble and need to look for your next employer.
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One of the things I did when updating my current development environment was to look for links to performance studies that showed how much performance increased when the development environment was improved. In my particular case, it was running 2 to 3 monitors on my desktop. I was able to find 3-4 articles describing how much was received from the additional monitor. It seems obvious to me that you need a new, well-tuned system for developers, especially since the cost of hardware relative to the cost of people these days is so low, but bean counters often think otherwise. If you can go armed with some industry research that shows productivity gains, I thinkthat it will be difficult to dismiss your concerns as environmental complaints.
FWIW, I was disappointed that I had to do research for an upgrade that would cost less than what the department would spend on paper in a month, but sometimes you have to do something that doesn't make sense to you because someone else makes sense ...
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Just step by step sync. Are you not typing so much code / second that the gsm connection can't keep up with it? Make sure your projects are set to use mocks / stubs.
Configuring this setting is probably beyond the capabilities of your client's system administrators.
Dependence on large databases should be reduced, so you only need to run daily regression tests.
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