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Key to Cloud Success: The Right ManagementThis IT Trend highlights some of the steps IT teams can take to keep their cloud environments running in a safe, efficient manner.
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3/6/2014 | 5:22:08 PM
You points are very valid and have been in play for years though many firms have failed to realize the benefits of such actions. I have spent over 20 years adjusting automated tasks to reduce down time and improve overall efficiency of the entire development cycle - requirements, design, coding, QA, deployment, production, maintenance and bug fixes.
Many organizations have low hanging fruit where tasks can be used to:
1. Reduce delays in getting senior management involved in determining when clients could or should be notified.
2. Prevent production failures or automatically scheduling review of non critical processes.
3. Streamline support through publication of recovery steps in alerts.
4. Provide Independent analysis and pre QA review of vendor updates.
5. Create Pattern recognition of development schedule conflicts and coding failures.
6. Do Maintenance / Oil change work that routinely targets poor code.
7. Perform Analysis of systems business rules with the ability to see complex failure points.
I don't think that it is so much a "convert or be redundant" situation for programmers since some of these trends take many years to evolve and are full of failures "lots of silver bullets around", rather I see this as an opportunity for the industry to evolve and in many ways go back to its roots to when quality was paramount and most programmers thought of work as a career and not just a job.
If what you say does come true then I welcome it for maybe we will finally see the end of companies like Yahoo and Google spreading poor coding practices and pathetic customer response practices. Yahoo's recent email disasters would have been laughed at as "Junior Mistakes" only a short time ago ... yet are currently praised by the likes of google as the "Way to develop".
Companies that take on your proposed approach can not only benefit from reduced development costs but much lower maintenance costs, higher customer satisfaction and probably more importantly the subtle benefit of dealing with a company whom you can trust to provide you with a quality product or service.