Challenging Our Assumptions

At a recent party I sat with a technology team whose members were dejected from having their latest project terminated by their company. This team spoke fondly about their months of development, their early adoption of cloud computing methods and technologies, and even their conferences and consultations with members of NASA regarding the use of advanced technologies. They shook their heads and couldn't understand why the system didn't succeed.

This team had hailed the project as the next great data transmission hub for the team's company. They specified communication protocols and APIs, worked with the application developers to foster understanding, and even reviewed a few sample data streams to understand the problem space. The project seemed to have everything going for it. But during construction of this hub, the team made a fateful design assumption regarding the separation of data streams within communication channels.

This assumption was that data streams could be separated by a data pattern that would "never be seen" in the actual live data itself. The team was warned by the application developers and certain managers that the possibility of this data pattern showing up in live data was in fact likely. Still, the team moved forward with completion of the system, performed some successful testing with a thin time-slice of data transmissions over a period of several days, and then went live with the system.

Within three hours of the system going live, this data pattern delimiter showed up in several places in the live data. As a result, the system was delivering incomplete data and crossing data transmission streams. Processes that were dependent on this new data transmission hub had to be reverted back to their old transmission methods. Beyond changing the data pattern delimiter to something else that might "never be seen" in the actual live data, the team did not have an alternative solution to this problem. And thus a short time later, the project was terminated.

Unfortunately for this team, a fundamental design assumption was made early on that contradicted directly with the problem space that their solution would address. The lack of challenge, investigation, and thorough testing of this assumption sealed the project's fate. While we are often proud of our assumptions, we are made better when our assumptions are challenged and tested at the earliest possible opportunity.