Aldon Announces Turkey Award Winners

Most Frightening Development Nightmare & Most Remarkable Project Turn-Around Story

Emeryville, CA—December-10-2008—Aldon, the ALM company for IT compliance, today announced the winners of its Developer Turkey Awards that honor and reward application development professionals who have either survived a development catastrophe, or averted one. Aldon solicited award submissions in two categories—Most Frightening Development Nightmare and Most Remarkable Project Turn-Around Story—and applicants were asked to share their high and low development scenarios that demonstrate how an application lifecycle management (ALM) solution helped or could have helped if they had it back then.

“We received a lot of great stories—some more serious than others—yet all were a giant reminder to where one small coding error can escalate,“ said Matt Scholl, Chief Executive Officer, Aldon. “These entries confirmed why ALM solutions are becoming a must-have for development teams. Disasters can be avoided and real business benefits gained.”

The winner in the Most Frightening Development Nightmare is Brad Abernathy, a 20-year veteran in development and now currently Senior Developer with Sunbelt Rentals. His story details how one accidental coding override led to total chaos, and almost a million dollar mistake! Back when Abernathy was a developer for a major manufacturer of high-end bedding and towels, his colleague was working on a project involving the shipping/re-order application. That developer created a logical file but did so right on top of the production physical. This created a bug that turned product order quantities from just two or three towel bundles into two or three million! Because there was no quality check, the systems nearly blew up trying to calculate and distribute orders in such massive quantities. It took several days and lots of over-time to get back to “business as usual.”

Abernathy says, “This was hands down the worst incident I have ever seen as a result of no source/object management. It was definitely a turkey disaster that could have been prevented if we had a change management solution like Aldon.”

Abernathy currently uses Aldon at Sunbelt Rentals where his team has total visibility into the lifecycle along with 24 x 7 confidence that they don't overwrite source code. Abernathy is quick to point out that “their jobs would be painful without Aldon.”

The winner in the Most Remarkable Project Turn-Around Category using Aldon is Manoj Dhamu, Senior Programming Analyst with DST Health Solutions, a health care services and software provider. Dhamu was working on one of DST Health Solutions' major products—a software application developed specifically for Managed Care organizations for member enrollment, claim processing, and premium billing. Dhamu and his team were using Aldon to manage its development—from build to deployment—but ran into a major glitch when they realized their product plays host to numerous custom programs with source code outside the area where Aldon was installed. With a looming deadline and the realization they would have to manually run those custom programs every time they rebuilt a file, the pressure was on. Fortunately, Aldon was able to re-tool the solution and incorporate all of this important external code into the development cycle. What could have taken months only took days—which meant tremendous cost savings for DST Health Solutions.

Dhamu cites the biggest benefits of having Aldon change management in place as “ease of development, multiple checkouts, and handling multiple releases for different clients.” He adds that the development cycle would take ages if they did not have Aldon, which would spell disaster for any product release.

The development stories don't stop there. Norman Martens, a Development Architect for a major health care services provider, who's been programming for nearly 35 years, is runner-up for the Most Remarkable Project Turn-Around Story using Aldon. He credits Aldon for helping ensure the company's primary warehouse application—which is considered one of the organization's major lifelines—never went down during a year-long application update with more code moving around then you could shake a stick at.

Martens was quick to add, “Not only that, thanks to Aldon, when the auditors come all we need to do is point and click to a specific report to fulfill compliance requirements. Now that is what I call avoiding disaster.” Nathan Hoy, Senior Program Analyst with LL Bean, takes runner-up slot for the Most Frightening Development Nightmare Story from an experience he had years ago at a former employer, a major retailer who shall remain nameless. Hoy was working with a newly hired developer who wrote a program to purge a very large file—one with more than 57 million records. When that developer accidently named the purge program the same name as a very active purchase application, chaos rippled through the retail sales channel, as point-of-sale machines froze up and customer tempers flared.Hoy found the positive: “The good news is that I finally got approval to upgrade to a decent change management package. And, of course, that package was Aldon.” First place winners received a Nintendo Wii and the Runner-ups received an Apple iPod Touch. In addition, all winners got a juicy holiday turkey shipped right to their homes, as well as a charity donation going out in their name.

About Aldon

Aldon is the ALM company for IT compliance. For over 25 years, we have been the experts in providing application lifecycle management solutions to ensure that change management, collaboration, and compliance are applied consistently across all areas of IT. Through our user-centric approach to process management, our service, change, and release management products help you focus on what you do best—providing superior services, rapidly developing applications, and efficiently managing your IT operations. Behind the scenes, we help you increase productivity, accelerate time-to-market, fully understand your IT assets, and easily achieve compliance with regulatory standards. A true testament to our products is our customer base with over 1,300 companies worldwide in over 70 of the Fortune 100. These companies rely upon our solutions to manage their global IT business and operations processes including application development, network operations, and services management. We are headquartered in Emeryville, California and have offices around the world serving more than 60 countries.