Good Tooling as valuable as Money in the Bank

As my youngest daughter turned five this week, my mind was cast back to what was happening around the time she was born.  At the time (with a previous employer) I was heavily immersed in the scoping,  development and subsequent delivery of our OSS 3G solution to be deployed to various corners of the world.  The daily challenges were tough, probably the toughest of my career to date.  Many weeks went by without seeing day light!

Even though every effort had been put in to avoid issues from occurring in the first place, Defect Prevention, Right First Time and 5  9’s, inevitably there were problems to be faced and resolved.  The ability to be able to react quickly, root cause a problem quickly and turn around a fix quickly, was something that we did really well, and is something that every successful company needs to be able to do well, because even with all the best intentions and initiatives, problems will happen, so you better be ready!  Besides the obvious significant human factor in driving through and delivering fixes in a timely manner, another key element of a quick resolution turn around, is good quality tooling.  Having met with the tooling team this week, it is clear that many of the tooling issues that existed 5 years ago, also exist today.  Now I don’t mean that the same bugs are present, but the reasons for the problems are the same, namely: compatibility and maintenance issues.  So while, today the order of the day is New Generation Networks, Wireless-Wireline, at an implementation level many of the old problems still exist. 

Given tooling is a critical element of Development and Automation Testing,  and as Developers are critical to the successful deployment of standards, providing a bank of tooling to the developer community helping them to be more productive with their time and reducing turnaround times for fixes has clear value.   The TM Forum Tooling team have been working on such tooling for a few years now, and there is alot of really good work going on within this team.  It’s a pity much of it was not available to my team 5 years ago!