SpikeSource - What Value Do They Add?
SpikeSource popped up on my radar after seeing an article on The Register. After looking a bit at what they do I still seem to be unable to see what value they add.
My main problem is one of their claims that…
Now I know there certainly weren’t 2,965 new stable releases of Apache in 2005, so my guess is their talking about changes to the development version of the code, which, as pretty much anyone in IT support will tell you, you should definitely not be using in a environment with real users.
They also seem to focus on detailing which components work together, which is useful for developers who have QA issues, but for the most part this testing is something the developer should be doing. If I’m told that version 1 of X works with version 2.3.4 of Y by the developers on the download page of the latest stable version then thats a claim they should be able to back up.
In short I can see they might have a future as a sub-contracted testing agency, but I don’t see why anyone would pay SpikeSource to double check test results, because everyones infrastructure is slightly different and I doubt SpikeSource have an exact replica of my infrastructure and that of all the people who use my systems in their test labs, and so their testing is not a guarantee of safety.