Debugging and Consulting Services
Give us your toughest problems...we will give you a solution.
We develop our engineers to use structured troubleshooting in order to find the
root cause of your problems. Our debugging methodologies allow us to work
on any system without having knowledge of your application. When debugging
an application or a system, we look at it from the perspective of the operating
system, network, or database. We see much more data than your log files can
tell you.
Your Finest Hour
Software is definitely not football, but the task of bringing a failed system back
into production when noone else knows what to do can feel like 4th and goal.
When the system is down, the IT manager is the bad guy. Production is stopped.
Every minute of downtime costs money. You have rebooted, restarted, reformatted,
re-everythinged and it still doesn't work. The production manager is asking
you when they will be online again. You don't know. Chaos erupts.
When you learn how to manage the chaos, you will approach your finest hour.
It is the time in which you lead a group of other leaders out of a bad situation.
You turn a possible tragedy into a memorable moment within your company in which
you literaly save the day. Your situation is what we call a "hotsite".
I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that
he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in good cause and
lies exhausted on the field of battle--victorious.
- Vince Lombardi
When you manage a hotsite correctly, you will always be victorious.
The Cost of Ownership
Caveat Emptor -- Let the Buyer Beware
The Latin phrase "caveat emptor" means that the buyer of a project assumes the risk
of the product. In essence, if you buy a product, it is your responsibility
to examine the condition and functionality of the product. This is true regardless
of what the salesperson told you. The sooner you realize that software has
bugs and salespersons sell you products with promised features that are missing,
the better off you will be.
Software companies have due dates that are forecasted. Salespersons hit the
streets and sell the product with a set of features listed. Rarely does the
date move. What happens is that certain features don't make it or get shoe-horned
into the final project. It isn't the developer's fault--it is just the way
software companies work.
What you are stuck with is a project that may not have all the features that you
planned on or runs poorly.
The following are all possibilities:
- It takes you much longer to implement and your production start date slips.
- The extra implementation days and existing bugs cause you to have extra staffing
and longer than predicted development times that push your budget over the predicted
amount.
- Once implemented, the support dollars that you have to sink into the project just
keep growing because the product is buggy.
- Missing features cause you to re-engineer your project.
These items along with many others make up the cost of ownership. This cost
is much higher than the sticker price of the software and the original budget of
the project.
The only way to avoid this is to perform a software architectural review as the
customer before purchasing.