Wednesday October 27, 2004

JDS Preview and change control

So, No jury duty. They didn't need me. I just made two phone calls and I am done with my civic duty for at least a year.

We had our JDS Preview Testing status review yesterday and came out with a list of action items. It turns out we need to get a couple more reviews and approvals for a change that impacts this many people so it looks like the change will not happen Monday. Maybe next Thursday or a week from Monday.. Ah well, I can't really fault following a proper change review process. Just a quick story about the need for change control.

Many, many, years ago I was managing the technical support organization at Digital Research, the micro computer pioneer, in Pacific Grove. We were supporting a product called CBasic Compiler and started getting calls from users who couldn't even get the compiler to load. We were stumped so the tech support guy called the product marketing manager. (Tom Byers who I think is now a professor at Stanford) Anyway it turned out that they had just made one small patch to the binary code on the master disk. No need to test such a small change or for that matter even mention the change to anybody. They had changed the company name to Digital Research. It was just one little change to some text.... But it wiped out an important register at the beginning of the file and rendered the compiler unusable. But it was just one little change. :-)