The power of open source

Here's a little detour from theory into real life. What do you do in a fortune 500 company when a major software deployment is getting ready to go spiraling down the drain? Forget all of the issues around contingency planning, release management, and the other management buzz-words executive like to use. What do you do when the release is going nation wide in 24 hours and has to be installed and fully operational in 10,000 locations 48 hours after that?

Call on open source.

I was tasked with planning and staffing a war-room / command center to go live in conjunction with the release. Our requirements:

• Create infrastructure that could track issues to resolution


• Plan for communications that would enable a dispersed team to share timely information


• Be ready for round the clock operations in as little as twelve hours (worst case) or 18 hour operations in twenty-four hours (best case)

Now, I had seen this coming and laid some ground work, but I was able to install Trac running on Apache2 using Subversion and mod_python to have a web application up and running in three hours.

This was with no IT or desktop support resources assigned; no contracts to be negotiated or signed, no bureaucratic red-tape or politics.

Open Source...It just works.