From the Association of Computing Machinery:
A Plea to Software Vendors from Sysadmins - 10 Do's and Don'ts
A friend of mine is a grease monkey: the kind of auto enthusiast who rebuilds engines for fun on a Saturday night. He explained to me that certain brands of automobiles were designed in ways to make the mechanic's job easier. Others, however, were designed as if the company had a pact with the aspirin industry to make sure there are plenty of mechanics with headaches. He said those car companies hate mechanics. I understood completely because, as a system administrator, I can tell when software vendors hate me. It shows in their products.
A panel discussion at CHIMIT (Computer-Human Interaction for Management of Information Technology) 2009 discussed a number of do's and don'ts for software vendors looking to make software that is easy to install, maintain, and upgrade. This article highlights some of the issues uncovered. CHIMIT is a conference that focuses on computer-human interaction for IT workers�the opposite of most CHI research, which is about the users of the systems that IT workers maintain. This panel turned the microscope around and gave system administrators a forum to share how they felt about the speakers who were analyzing them.
Here are some highlights:1. DO have a "silent install" option. One panelist recounted automating the installation of a software package on 2,000 desktop PCs, except for one point in the installation when a window popped up and the user had to click OK. All other interactions could be programmatically eliminated through a "defaults file." Linux/Unix tools such as Puppet and Cfengine should be able to automate not just installation, but also configuration. Deinstallation procedures should not delete configuration data, but there should be a "leave no trace" option that removes everything except user data.
Nine more just as good. Thinking about it, I have probably spent five or six months waiting for software to install. A lot of times I find something else to do but still, the constant prompts get to me. I used to manage a software test lab with 1,100 client computers -- there, we used a disk imaging system that worked pretty well but when dealing with 12 laptops, it was a toss-up as to what was more efficient, developing a disk image and then going around and re-personalizing each system or just setting them up on a couple folding tables and walking around and around and around hitting the fscking Enter key fifty-gazillion times... I would love to see a software package that came with an install.txt with commented examples that I could edit. Fire it up with a command line like: nameless_ap_setup -R install.txt -L c:\foobar\nameless_ap -P T (or -P R) This would be: Setup the "nameless application" -R = Read the file "install.txt" for the install parameters, -L install the application to the Location c:\foobar\namele... -P Place the application Parameters in a Text file or in the Registry. Something like this would be ignored by 95% of the in-duh-vidual customers out there but would make or break a corporate purchase.
