Back in 2003 and 2004 – I was blessed to be working with a number of teammates including a couple of mentors that I still maintain contact with to this day. The entry into Starwood was set a couple years in advance as my first manager at Starwood recruited me into the shop based upon a prior stint a few years earlier. I met this mentor when I joined his team after departing Instinctive Technologies (which later became known as eRoom) with the promise of an early stage set of founders shares along with the opportunity to truly learn the craft of QA. Well – the startup ended up folding within six months as the dot com mania imploded. It was a hard lesson learned, and that entire process warrants a future post. Like so many other things – this was not a coincidence as I look back. I met some incredible people, which leads me to Starwood.
At Starwood, I was chartered to join my mentor/manager in building out a Quality Assurance function — building upon a cadre of exceptional talent that absolutely knew the business in a very strong way many times this team was educating the development teams and executives that were consumers of the information we uncovered. It was during this experience at Starwood that I had some substantial lessons learned during my career as I found myself promoted upon the departure of my mentor. I was 27 and now a director with a team of nearly a dozen true professionals that were experts in the hospitality and travel industries. It was my job to innovate the team into a world class quality assurance team that moved beyond testing services and into a truly multifaceted QA Center of Excellence spanning a domestic basis and moving into an outsourced relationship with HP as the provider of our staff augmentation based out of Bangalore.
Right around this timeframe, the VMWare stack had finally begun to break through from a desktop dev/test use case and into a truly disruptive force within the data center. It was right around this time that Rational was acquired by IBM, and we had to scale our testing with a newly worldwide team with multiple software engineering efforts all requiring concurrent delivery. I had maintained contact with a couple of friends from my initial exposure to Rational’s Unified Process, ClearQuest, ClearCase, a partial UCM deployment, and Requisite Pro tooling as they departed the IBM-led Rational business.
A couple guys ended up over at a little company based out of Austin – named Surgient.
They were doing some very unusual things back in 2003 and increasingly so in 2004 as we sought to render an encapsulated engineering desktop in support of our worldwide team members while also insuring we had maximum software engineering output. We landed upon a cluster of hosts that were able to render what is now called ‘remote desktops’ for our Bangalore-based resources. These desktops proved to be instrumental in scaling the productivity of the folks in India in a manner that was unique at the time.
Do you remember what 2004 was like? We were running AIM, Palm was still relevant, and the iPhone was a glimmer. Remote desktops with engineering packages loaded as ‘gold images’ for anyone around the world – this was unheard of.
As great as these desktops were, this was the initial use case. These desktops were rendered via a unique approach taken by Surgient that obfuscated the specifics of the gold image in an automated manner – years before VMWare enabled catalog-based image selection and promotion via a web based interface.
The secondary and more powerful use case was focused on taking the same notions of abstraction and of linked images – to render an automated build and tear down of composite environments with multiple VMs as the code was promoted, compiled, and deployed into an automated set of environments that would then house the resulting code and configurations. The virtual engine that was invoked by the automation was authored by Surgient with automated daily ‘smoke tests’ being rendered via Mercury (later acquired by HP) against the specific VM topologies that were up to 8 different manufacturing lines. Heady stuff for 2004.
As the automated tests were invoked, we curated logic that had the images captured when there were issues with the tests with things being isolated from the failures in terms of the test case tied out to the functional target of the test, and tied to the automatically provisioned application environment/underlying IaaS. This many times helped to narrow the issue to the root cause, increasing velocity for root cause determination. This practice of a constantly invoked smoke test with an automated, representative data set, and encapsulating infrastructure environment enabled a baseline of quality to be adhered to as we continued to layer in additional engines and lines of engineering efforts. This was innovative at the time in the industry.
It garnered the team a hit in the press where we outlined how Surgient’s VQMS helped us in scaling our newly formed team – in support of delivering an overhauled central reservation system commonly referred to as Valhalla.
Here’s the link to the print capture of the brief article that was published back in August, 2004.
If you are interested in getting some time on the calendar – you can check / book some time with me via this link.