Long couple of nights, but then a relatively early finish last night by the Red Sox. Hopefully they will wrap up with a victory in Game 6 on Wednesday. It is also the halloween season. We vividly remember the days when our boys were little. In the last minute, they used to come up with ideas for costumes that simply didn’t exist in stores that you could buy. My wife used to work her magic to make them happen. The happiness in them for the few hours that they wore the custom costumes were priceless! It is like the customization that we are asked to do at work on a regular basis. No, I am not saying that our collaborators are like children!

At the entrance to Clapp library you will see the “Halloween Desk” inviting you check out one of the thrilling books. I saw them setting this up yesterday evening. The work we do every day is “thrilling”  in some sense. The excitement as well as anxiety associated with any project rollout is amazing. The thrill comes from the fact that we have collaborated and contributed to something that is typically exciting. But the anxiety is real – “How well is this going to go?”. In case you have not  heard about a couple of recent technical debacles, such as the rollout of signing up for the affordable care act, you must be living in some other planet. You can view the Saturday Night Live version of this here. In some sense, all of us in this business worry about issues such as the website performance for Obamacare in a much smaller scale. This is why comprehensive testing is critical. You have heard me say this several times before – that it is impossible to predict all the variations in the theme up front even if you do comprehensive testing, but that does not mean you shouldn’t test. In other words, no matter how comprehensive a test you perform, you will always encounter issues. You want to make sure that these issues are more of an outlier than the norm and that  you have a plan/strategy for handling the outliers.

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