A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. – Laozi

The other day I was asked about whether an encryption feature in a product I work on supports user-supplied keys. I had to look back in Jira, years into the past, for the answer, which was: nope. It supports default keys, but we hadn’t had time for supporting user-supplied ones.

While this is a little disappointing, it still was the right thing for us to do. That’s the paradox of incremental development, and why I think it’s hard for developers to fully embrace it.

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As tech lead of Cloudera Altus Director, I’ve often been asked whether some product feature, or use of a particular version of some external software, or use of some external service – some it – is supported. I found that it’s really hard to answer these questions. There are different factors involved, like how much testing we’ve done or continue to do, or what we recommend to customers, or say we’ll let them at least get away with. The answer is rarely a binary, absolute yes or no.

So I spent some mental cycles thinking about the question of whether something is supported. Thinking about the different angles, I came up with a hierarchy of support levels. It’s certainly a “1.0” sort of artifact. But, I think it’s a good starting point, and it already helps me answer “Is it supported?” questions today.

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