Prepare, by Photo Monkey

Prepare, by Photo Monkey

VeriSign consultant Nick Coblentz published seven quick tips for preparing for an application assessment. If you use custom applications for any of your business, you should have them regularly assessed. Developers are human, and we (I used to do dev work) make mistakes.

I’d like to augment the list based on recent client experience. These are really two ways to say Build a Contingency Plan.

Expect thing to go wrong – ESPECIALLY if you are testing against production systems. Expect that the whole application will bomb. How will you recover? Do you have staff on-call that can restore services in hours or minutes? Remember, the most relevant tests will be against production critical applications. Applications that, if inactive, will impact your business or customers directly. Build that contingency plan!

Expect thing to go REALLY wrong – You are testing against a QC environment, production is not tested directly… What could go wrong? When things go wrong, they usually do it in a stellar way. Like the big guy that thinks he’ll entertain folks by jumping off the diving board, only to slip and belly flop. Many times, our applications rely on other services, or have access into other core areas of infrastructure that testing can impact. Are you prepared for a network outage? What if the application starts acting weird and fills up your interweb tubes? Build that contingency plan!

Go check out Nick’s post!

This post originally appeared on BrandenWilliams.com.

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