Working around development constraints in customer policy

Question

As described before, I work in IT consultancy and move through various customer environments. It is natural to encounter a variety of security policies, and in most environments we have had to go through a security checklist before authorizating our laptops - our mobile development workstations - for connection into their network (most of the time just development network).

There is this customer who does not allow external computers to connect to their network, so our laptops are.... expensive communication computers with mobile GSM modems. We are forced to use their desktop PCs for development, and those workstations are pretty old models with low RAM and single-core Pentium 4 CPUs and cranky disks. Needless to say, development work is sub-optimal, especially when working with Visual Studio solutions that can range 100 - 400 projects.

For small cases that can be isolated, we develop and test on our own laptops. But for the bigger cases, given that certain development servers like SeeBeyond and mainframe DB2 databases are only on the network, and the prospect of copying hundreds of projects to and fro machines is just ghastly, it does not seem like a technically sound idea.

I am not asking for tricks that violate the customer's policies (e.g. plug laptop in masquerading desktop MAC address). I just like to know what others have tried to retain some of their advantage and efficiency with their own hardware when working in such environments. Whenever I can I try to duplicate the environment with virtual servers on my own laptop, but it only goes so far with Microsoft-only server solutions. Virtualizing non-Microsoft server and software is a challenge.

Answer 1

I just went through this and found a pretty good solution : get a different job

Answer 2

That's tough. The root cause here is management that doesn't understand that there are real cost implications to their choice of environments.

Your problem is that while you may be billing by the hour, you probably aren't getting paid that way, so your customers' wasted time goes into the pockets of your boss and not to you. A lot of times, this presents a mild conflict of interest. Your company has about zero incentive to speed up your work, and your client doesn't want to make an infrastructure investment in what they see as a temporary engagement.

All I can say is that you have to run this up the flagpole with management. You have to show them that this is taking real time from the projects which could put your deliverable dates at risk, or worse, the reliability of these machines is such that it puts the delivery of the end product at risk as well. The onus is on you to make your management into a believer.

A gig of RAM at Crucial is thirty bucks. If nobody is willing to shell out 90 big ones for 3GB of RAM for your box, you have management that's actively working against you or does not respect you. If it comes to that, you've got bigger problems and need to look for your next employer.

Answer 3

One of the things that I did when I upgrade my current development environment was find links to productivity studies that showed how much productivity increased when the development environment was enhanced. In my particular case it was going from 2 to 3 monitors on my desktop. I was able to find 3-4 articles that described how much was gained by having the extra monitor. It seems self-evident to me that you'd want a newer, well-configured system for developers, especially since the cost of the hardware relative to the cost of the people is so small these days, but the bean counters often think differently. If you can go in armed with some industry studies that show productivity gains, I think it will be harder to dismiss your concerns as just complaints about the environment.

FWIW, I was disappointed to have to do the research for an upgrade that cost less than what the department would spend on paper in a month, but sometimes you have to do things that make no sense to you because it makes sense to someone else.

Answer 4

Write a decent proposal to your manager, that's about all you can do to rectify the solution. If he is unwilling or unable to fix the problem, or unwilling/unable to pass the proposal up to someone who can, then I'd say the current situation is what they've decided to use.

In that case, either live with it, or don't, ie. move on.

The proposal should contain:

1. A proposal for what you want done
2. Why it should be done
3. The consequences of doing it
4. And most importantly, the consequences of not doing it

List things like longer development time, or less testing, or less time to write quality code. Basically, a minor upgrade that doesn't cost much will improve the quality of the product tremendously.

Answer 5

Just synchronize incrementally. You're not typing that much code/second a gsm connection cannot keep up with it? Make sure your projects are setup to use mocks/stubs whereever possible.

Setting this up probably is beyond the capability of the systems administrators of your customer.

The dependency on the big databases should be reduced so you only need to run daily regression tests.