Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

CrowdStrike – Undeniable Proof – Agile Must Be Banned Globally

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek
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By now most of you have heard of the Great CrowdStrike Outage of 2024. Actually using the year in the name is probably making too broad of an assumption that there will be only one. At least $10 billion in worldwide financial damage all due to Agile. This myth that a cesspit of User Stories, TDD, and CI/CD with daily stand-ups is a valid software development methodology, it’s not.

We need global laws banning the use of Agile. At least we need them in the U.S. and E.U. If China, Russia, and Iran want to ruin their countries with Agile more power to them!

Agile – pushing whatever hand polished turd that pooped out the back of the last Sprint onto unsuspecting users globally “to get feedback.” Yes, I’ve written a book on Agile. I’ve even written about Agile’s Mega Failures. There have been so many I have honestly lost track of them. Until we start putting CEOs in prison for these things, they are going to keep happening.

How Do We Fix This?

Use of Agile must be banned in all things sold

Agile is nothing more than hacking on the fly with some meaningless rituals thrown in so management can feel like it is managing something. Agile eliminates the application architect, any real up-front design, and most importantly, testing. Automated test scripts that test nothing is __NOT__ testing. Nothing can replace professional test teams using actual hardware.

All things critical must use the 510K process

The government and possibly a few “industry leaders” need to publish an official list of critical systems and applications. Operating systems, security software, antivirus, and network communications all fall under this. No more hurling a hand polished turd onto the unsuspecting public.

No more than 10% law

American and the EU need to pass and viciously enforce with mandatory prison time that no single operating system or application exists on more than 10 percent of systems. No more of this monopoly shit. No more all things run us. You’ve created a single point of failure! This was just greed bundled with incompetence. Imagine if it was an actual attack?

  • No more than 10 percent can run Windows. No, Microsoft can’t spin off 5000 paper shells to increase market share by having them sell the same OS with a tweaked name.
  • No more than 10 percent can run a single flavor of Linux
  • No more than 10 percent can run Apple, Android, etc.
  • No more than 10 percent can use Azure.
  • No more than 10 percent can use AWS.
  • No more than 10 percent can use CloudFlare, etc.

You get the idea. Globally we can handle a 10 percent outage. If 10 percent of the airlines are down at O’Hare people can still get flights. That most rural airport served by a single airline with 3 flights per week, people are just plain screwed and they know it. If 10 percent of the retailers in your city/town suddenly can’t take credit cards, it sucks to be them because you will take your credit card to a retailer that is still operational.

Summary

You know, in the real world of IT, I have had to make numerous disaster recovery plans. The government used to make publicly traded companies physically test their disaster recovery plan every year. They need to start doing that again. Not one airline had “what to do when all our Windows machines go down” in their disaster recovery plan. Passengers were just left stranded.

Pete Buttigieg, this is on you.

Every transportation company that is either publicly traded or has more than 10 percent of the market must have a disaster recovery plan in place that is fully tested each and every year.

You who cannot look up from your iMbecile phone long enough to actually have a life think I’m chicken little because you don’t know enough about life to be concerned. You only care if you are the one stranded at the airport. How about a terrorist attack? Shutting down the Windows machines used by airlines traps massive numbers of people at every airport giving you numerous heavily populated targets. What happens when a train control system fails?

I work in the medical device field. Do you know that we have to test patient monitor systems to ensure sticking the temperature probe into an outlet doesn’t harm or kill the patient? Why? Because that shit has happened. You’ve now had a dry run without a body count of a massive terrorist attack preceded by trapping huge numbers of people at airports. That will mask which one(s) is(are) the real target(s).

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.