Complacency can be a a very dangerous thing. I was reminded of that last night, when my primary use iPhone suddenly bricked in the midst of a text conversation. You see – the beta loads from Apple expire after a given period of time, and I’d reached it. So not only was I somewhat abusing the intent of the betas, but I had made the mistake of relying upon them for daily use.

As I recovered my iPhone last night (and Ian’s this morning), I began to think about this little debacle as it related to BigBlueButton and Coral CEA’s recent addition to the developer’s sandbox around “BBB”. As BigBlueButton was maturing, it was common to leverage the lead customer (Carleton University’s TIM program) as a field testing site for the newest pre-production software loads. While BigBlueButton remained relatively controlled by the university research population, this wasn’t really a big issue.

As the BigBlueButton community expanded, and more code was contributed by more sources, it became more difficult for any single designer to have a full view of the changes being made to the product and therefore it became more difficult for any single designer to validate the system. Invariably, this would lead to an increasing number of issues in the load deployed to the lead customer. Complacency had set in… Everyone was testing their little bits in isolation, and the friendly lead customer was being treated as a verification site.

The issue with this is when things really start to go wrong and the lead customer begins to refuse to take new loads (because they’ve now been burned with their own complacency), the lack of proper verification processes are now exposed.

And that’s what brings us to the recent Coral CEA addition of a test environment for supported platforms. We recognised, working with the TIM program leadership, that there is a need for a verification environment on which member companies may validate their usage and integration of Coral CEA capabilities (including BigBlueButton) into their products. Coral CEA’s ability to scale the sandbox infrastructure cost effectively for members removes the barrier to performing valid system-level testing. Additionally the expertise of the Coral CEA staff in ensuring proper real-world system configuration has proven value to our membership.

Removing the complacency around the verification process – both from the lead user and from the developers – ensures  a stable product is making its way to the user community. And that ensures that there’s no pauses during a a live distance education session to reboot the servers, or reinstall software. We encourage all out of members to leverage the sandbox validation environment to ensure their integrated offering is functioning as expected. We additionally can help ensure proper configuration, and that the verification plans properly account for scaling/capacity validation.

No one wants to sit around waiting for a problem with Beta software to get resolved while they’re blocked from their primary system… Just ask Ian what twelve hours with your primary mobile phone feels like