RE: [nv-l] servmon and itmquery in NV 7.1.4

["Barr, Scott" <Scott_Barr@csgsystems.com>]

James I was never asked to join the beta. I am pathologically unable to decline participaiting in betas. I cannot prevent signing non-disclosure agreements, my hand magically signs them without my willing consent. I've sought counseling. Believe me, I would have participated.

 

Now, I did participate in the switch analyzer beta and had to curtail my efforts there because of poor timing of code release in conjunction with large work projects arriving suddenly. If the person still running the beta tests is Mark W, I've known him for at least 10 years and participated in several NetView ESP's and betas (mainframe and otherwise), there should be no question I would be available for beta testing.

 

I guess in response to your other question, it boils down to this. I see NetView evolving and de-evolving all at the same time. It suffers from schizophrenia driven by "marketing". Now don't get me wrong, the method being used to survey people and get enhancement requests into the developers hands is valid and acceptable. But I often wonder about the desire to please everyone all the time. This feature was not ready. It has all the earmarks. Documented features that aren't there, confusion in support over what the feature is supposed to do, and the inability of level 3 to provide a spec that I can code the status application against - the programmers can't tell me how to write code to interface with it. C'mon.

 

And frustration, anger, disappointment are all the result of a simple response from level 3-- they said "no" to something that black letters on white paper said should be there. At some point in time, software companies become accountable. If it were a car, or a washing machine, or a child's toy, it would NOT be acceptable to say the product does something it does not. But in the software industry liberties are taken through oversight, lack of planning and poor judgment. My anger is not so much as an individual programmer as it is at an organization that from time to time demonstrates that if they had 4 arms, the would not be able to find a left one.

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com [mailto:owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com]On Behalf Of James Shanks
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 9:04 AM
To: nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com
Subject: RE: [nv-l] servmon and itmquery in NV 7.1.4

Jane, and Scott,

Help me out here, folks.  I don't want to upset anyone nor rub salt into a wound, but I am very puzzled.


Both of you, Jane and Scott, have expressed extreme disappointment over what was provided as new function in NetView 7.1.4.

I'm sorry about that.  I'll grant you that the new function is not much.  But I'm mystified as to why you thought there would be so much more.  This is just another NetView point release.  Most of what got in there was to support new events going to TEC.   Now that NetView is a component of TEC, that is it's primary job, so far as Tivoli upper management is concerned.    I think that NetView development may have wished to provide more, but they have to negotiate for every extra day to code something new that isn't mandated by a TEC requirement.

So I've asked the question internally why you were both not included in the 7.1.4 beta, so that two of our most valuable and vocal users could have previewed the function, and provided vital feedback to development.   I was stunned to be told  that both of you were offered the opportunity to participate and that both of you turned it down!

Is this true?  Can you share with us why?  

That would have been the ideal method for you to avoided all this surprise and disappointment.  And your comments, likes and dislikes, would have gone all the way up the chain beyond NetView development and TEC development to the folks who control the entire Tivoli marketing strategy.  You could have obtained a commitment from development as to when your full needs would be met.  

Why didn't you grab it?



James Shanks
Level 3 Support  for Tivoli NetView for UNIX and Windows
Tivoli Software / IBM Software Group