Reliable Systems

As you can tell from the timeline It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything.  It isn’t because I’ve had nothing to say – instead, I’ve been completely consumed by leading the team creating Gibraltar, a new application monitoring product for .NET teams that we’re launching.  You can download the latest version at  www.GibraltarSoftware.com.  We just published the last beta version of the product before the commercial release which is scheduled for June 1, 2009.

Bring a new product to market is really hard.  I’m sure you’ve heard that before – but however hard you think it is, it’s harder than that.  While we’re not quite across the finish line, there are a few things that have become readily apparent:

• Commercial-grade quality takes a lot to achieve.  At each turn where you might normally say “well, users just shouldn’t do that” you can’t.  Things you otherwise solved through training you can’t.  It’s the difference in construction of a commercial Amp and the receiver you bought at Best Buy.  
• Users won’t read anything.  We did a beta release where we posted in five places instructions for how to upgrade from the prior beta which required an extra step or things wouldn’t work.  We got deluged with calls about it not working from virtually every beta user; no one read any of the notes they saw, even in bold text in a yellow box in the middle of the screen.
• Marketing involvement early and often:  The feedback from our first beta version was brutal; it told us that we were going in entirely the wrong direction because the users we were building the app for weren’t going to buy anything regardless of how singing & dancing it was.  We had to step back and go a whole different direction.  That would have been far more painful if we hadn’t been early in the process.

From here on out, I’ll be contributing to a separate blog articles that are focused on .NET software development and being part of a small Independent Software Vendor (ISV).  This site will focus in more on its original goal:  IT and business strategies for reliable systems.