mobcode

Tell the team when you mess with a shared server

You are working on a distributed team. There are a handful of other people working on the team. You are sharing a server. When you do anything disruptive on the shared server you must tell the team.

This means you must tell the team when you do things like:

• change the system configuration
• start/stop a shared server process
• run a resource intensive operation
• start/stop the server

At some point, everyone on the team is trying to understand why the server is doing what it is doing. Often it seems the server has a life of its own. There are enough wrinkles of complexity and unexpected dependencies in the operating system and the applications and in the network interactions that it can be very hard to understand what the server is doing. This problem is compounded greatly when there is a person on the other side of the world, invisibly making changes. Now the system really does appear to have a life of its own! The other person has effectively become part of the black-box everyone is trying to understand.

So whenever you are messing with a shared server tell.

Even if it is just a dev server tell the team.

Even if nobody else is online, tell the team (they are going to come online and they are going to wonder what is going on with the server).

Even if 99 times out of 100 nobody cares about your messages, tell them (you can never tell when it will be the 1 time out of 100).

Even if everyone says they don’t care about the messages, tell them (the messages are only “un-necessary because you are sending them).

The goal is to create a virtual, shared work room. In a virtual, shared work room you could see if someone stood up from their desk and walked over to the main server and started punching buttons on it. Everyone would notice this. Even if they did not care at the moment, they would still notice and have a basic situational awareness of what is going on in their world.

So tell the team when you mess with a shared server.