Insanity Integration
It has been said that “the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expect different results“. While this may or may not be true, programs that can easily get caught in repetitive or infinite loops can certainly be the cause of crazy data and logs. And so we need to recognize this potential and make sure we don’t write integrations susceptible to this ailment.
But there is another type of “doing the same thing,” that can be just as maddening. These are errors that continue to happen and no one bothers to fix them because the resolution is simple even if it is manual. Like hitting the side of an old TV to clear up the picture. It may work, but eventually all that time spent with the fuzzy picture, or making that quick manual change add up. And that time is worth money.
What I recommend is that errors not only be tracked to ensure someone is alerted and they are resolved. But errors instances are counted and reported so that support, development and management can see what the most frequent errors are.
Asking your support people to do the same thing over and over may not mean that you or they are insane, but it can result in something like it. Find ways to automate or eliminate these repeating time wasters. And with the data of how often and how long they took to fix, you can report how much time you are saving everyone.
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April 19th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Exactly! Even automating simple things is well worth it, because over time they add up!