Originally Posted by
newamiga
I work for a software company. If we ever did the stupid things these guys do on production servers without testing and did it during the middle of the day, people would be fired period.
I also work for a software company and it surprises me how many of my customers do not have a test environment. I currently have 6 accounts and these are big name customers--- there's a good chance that each FT'er on this forum and located in the US is a customer of one of my customers, either from your credit card, IRA, cell phone providor, cable providor, or prescription drugs. Only ONE of my customers has a test environment. Everyone else slams patches, service packs and changes right into Production. And yes we see a LOT of outages that could have been prevented with a little testing. Considering that one of the products I work with is used extensively for litigation and compliance, and that the SEC can fine a non-compliant financial institution $150k/day, it mystifies me. Add in that lots of these companies have heavily silo'ed IT teams that do not communicate and make changes to dependant systems without telling eachother, and it's a miracle that e-commerce in the US is not at a standstill.
Not defending US, just saying the lack of pre-change testing is nothing unique to them. It's a lot more common in the IT world than you think.
In this situation, all that can be done is call into the reservations lines and hopefully the spike in call volume will show up on some manager's reports, which can then be used to justify a better change control procedure.