Do the Math
I love math, although the funny thing is, I was really bad at it going through school and had to have a math tutor in high school. These days, I actually consider going back to school to study math from time to time. Talk about a change. What intrigues me the most is the ability to use math to come up with clever ways to solve problems. This became apparent to me since I actually honed my math skills by majoring in Music Composition.
During freshman year my professor played a recording of a piece of music, roughly 5 minutes long. He would play the piece once and it was our job, after the piece was played, to write the general score down. The challenge; we could only write for the first 30 seconds and the last 10 seconds of the recording! Five minutes of music with 40 seconds of writing to get the general score? Impossible we all said, it would take hours to transcribe 5 minutes of music with this many parts. We would need to listen to it over and over again to get it right...we all stared at him like he was crazy.
By my Junior year I could do it with only 10 seconds of writing at the beginning of the piece and a second at the end. It was dead simple, because it was math. What you need is the data that starts it and ends it. You can determine the path from those two points. [NOTE: This applies mostly to classical music]
The same thing applies to network equipment testing - I see too many engineers test their equipment without data. What does traffic look like in the real world? Sometimes a customer will quote an RFC, but the RFC is 10 years old and the standards, while not documented, have changed completely. If you don't know what the network looks like, even just 10 seconds of the beginning and 1 second at the end, you can't test your product correctly. After all, just because you know networks have HTTP in it, doesn't mean that's the only thing running. To complete the analogy, it would be like listening just for the drums to figure out the tune; you need to hear/see the whole thing for a good picture.
This resonated with me again when I saw a competitor just announced P2P support. Just announced? P2P is over 30 percent of network traffic and some test tools are just adding it? Heck some don't even have it yet. If you don't have the data, things will never add up.
