My wife and I recently attended a 2-day-long country music festival. It is getting warm down here in the south, so there was almost as much skin exposed as there was drinking and dancing. And with that many bare arms, legs and midriffs, you get to see a lot of tattoos up front and center.
By definition, a tattoo is very personal statement. And, for almost everybody, it is a permanent statement. With this in mind, I have to admit that the number of “bad” tattoos on display just outright shocked me. I’m not referring to the ones that espouse questionable opinions or have copywrited characters in new situations. By bad, I mean the ones that seem to have had either little (or no) thought put into the design and/or the artist who will be doing the actual inking. The intention was to honor your Grandmother. I’m OK with that. But the image that I see looks like a representation of something that escaped from The Island of Dr. Moreau, and it drawn by a (loosely called) artist who failed coloring in Kindergarten and has only gotten worse from there.
If you had had another person with you at the studio that day, might they have prevented you the heartache of this, ahem, masterpiece? Did Grandma really have three oddly-crossed eyes that were spaced too close and bloodshot red? With a unibrow, no less?
In Ivanti Service Manager, you can use the UAT environment as that good friend with the non-biased opinion. UAT is not a substitute for Development, but acts as a “as close to perfect” replica of your Production environment. After building your new enhancement in Staging/Development, you should promote it into UAT and let some trusted individuals figuratively kick the tires. If you made these improvements based upon somebody’s request, then they should also be allowed to play with the goods, too.
If the reviews are wonderful, then it is an easy move to push these updates into Production. If your work, on the other hand, falls short of what was wanted (or just looks bad), then you’ve got a second, third, etc. chance to go back into Staging to update the work before once again promoting it back to UAT for review. This way, your final Production customers only get to see a functionally and artistically completed masterpiece, and those other sub-par iterations don’t have to be mentioned ever again. Unlike that tattoo of your Granny that you got for $10 from some toothless guy in the back of a truck behind the local biker bar…
If you discover that your environment was set up without a functioning UAT landscape, contact Dataseti, and we can help you get one up and running.
-Jeffrey Bromberger, Consultant & CISA, CRISC
Contact the consulting team at consultants@dataseti.com
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