I was recently requested to support a Federal Agency that was tasked with validating the performance of an application to be globally deployed.
Due to current events the timelines for testing and certification had become critical and the contractor responsible for the project was under enormous pressure to complete this engagement quickly. In conversations with the contractor prior to arriving onsite, I asked a series of questions intended to reveal the lab environment and methods of test traffic generation. It became clear that some big action items that needed to done in order to achieve the requisite environment and deliver all of the desired results was still unfinished.
Some of these dependencies included….
- Reaching consensus among all the constituent groups as to what would constitute the physical test network as well as the specific impairments to define the characteristics of the circuits to be recreated within the Shunra scenarios.
- Confirmation of existing test scripts of the application for both the QTP and HP Performance Center traffic generation tools.
- Communication between the contractor (Project Manager), network equipment vendors, QTP and Performance Center engineers and Shunra to ensure that each step in the process was coordinated to proceed in an orderly sequence.
As these conversations took place it became evident that the project manager had never been exposed to the complexities associated with the range of technologies and the number of disparate groups required to compete the task. I cautioned him that to guarantee timely completion of all these steps a meeting should be scheduled to include all the participants prior to arriving onsite. Shunra offered our Professional Services to act as the Project Manager to broker to meeting and to coordinate the project execution. The key benefit to ensure that all parties would be fully prepared to execute their tasks when needed. This offer was declined. The meeting never was organized and the timelines of the engagement suffered accordingly.
Once onsite the network engineers and Shunra spent considerable time connecting and configuring the test lab to allow communication between all of the known test devices. After completion a member of the Performance Center group popped into the lab and informed us that some traffic needed to be initiated from end users on another network in a different building. This change mandated a complete reconfiguration effectively wasting hours of work. Only after completion of this task did the contractor learn that no test scripts had been created to exercise the application. Script creation could potentially add days or weeks to the completion of the project.
Meanwhile the representative from the Agency requesting this evaluation would appear every ten minutes asking whether the job was done. As the sweat poured off the brow of my contractor I could only shake my head and think…..Told you so…..
The lesson to be learned is that Shunra has a cadre of experienced professionals that can deal with the complexities of these engagements. In a proactive systemic process we can anticipate all contingencies and implement best practices honed over years of direct experience. With this expertise from our Professional Services group the scoping, timing, and delivery of test results are guaranteed.
The contractor is still in stasis awaiting his test scripts and that Federal representative is still poking his head asking for the results.
Oh well………
Leave a Reply