Dark IT Patterns: The Rainy Day Server Pool

Scenario
A team finds themselves constantly being delayed due to lengthy internal requisition processes and bureaucracy.

Problem
Projects are delayed due to internal bureaucracy. Important pieces of hardware and software are waiting on another part of the organisation to requisition them and set them up.

How it works
Instead of requesting the resources at the point they are needed, the team requests them at the start of their project, or at the end of their previous project. In effect, the team maintains a pool of resources, ready to be used by their next project.

A cost is shifted forward to well before it is actually needed, but the advantage is in the agility of project delivery. There could also be some costs to being on standby (e.g. monthly license fees or server electricity costs).

Real life

Due to team size scale up and release date pressure, this practice is common in game development studios. Its also common in government departments and larger organisations. It can apply for any sort of hardware or software - desktop machines, tablets, mobile phones, licenses for design software, server hardware or database instances.

The migration to the cloud has meant that servers are now a lot quicker to spin up virtually. So due to cloud IaaS, there is less need for this, especially for server hardware and database instances.

Corporate ethics
Its not really a problem in terms of ethics - its more like an indication that some processes in the organisation are too slow and should be improved.


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