I started working with a new client on Monday. I was actually gearing up for a gig with BlackBerry programming for a large international company, but during the negotiations of requirements/scope I was snapped up for a last minute opportunity. So Monday I started working for the new international manufacturing facility and I’ve been dropped into developing an application that fits between the 20 year old MRP system to the new enterprise wide ERP system.
Here in lies the problem. Originally the job consisted of performing last minute debug, and modification to the program to finish off two messages (xml documents) generated by the system for upload. Coming into the project I thought I’d be put into a situation where I’d have a code base loaded into visual source safe, some code documentation, if I was lucky some UML or business requirements documents, but wow was I mistaken.
First thing I find out is instead of a web application as put into the deliverables this application is actually a desktop application, and isn’t just one application but three. Each application uses the same database backend, but unfortunately nobody knows exactly what tables/fields to use. It also turns out that the developer I’m replacing used no source control whatsoever, and in fact I spent much of my first day just looking through his system/servers for his application solution.
I worked with the IT at the company, of which there were few, and was greeted to both pessimism and dismay. Things like MSDN were deemed unnecessary, nobody knew how to setup Visual Source Safe (VSS), but after some searching I did find a database. After trying to get access to the database I had to reacquisition a VSS installation, explain to the network admins what it was, and what I needed it for. From there I had to make manual backups of the code I found, and work off of copies of these solutions to perform development work.
It only got worse… I found that much of what the developer (whom left the company mind you) had done was unfinished, values and connection strings were hard coded, and there were infrequent and seldom used comments. The developer was supposed to be available via consult, only after normal working hours, but had yet to respond to emails/calls and generally has been a ghost.
Day three of this process and I’m starting to get a feel for what’s missing, and it far outreaches the initial scope. So, I’ve lost one week of my vacation in order to keep going on this project, and I’m drinking from the fire hose as they say. I’ll even say this project is in Visual Basic (VB) .Net, which is definitely not my preferred language. Frankly don’t care for VB at all, and after having jumped onto a VB.Net 1.1 project I am missing my C# 2.0 framework on Visual Studio 2005 even more. Well, I’m off, happy coding.
Business
vb.net, consulting, new client, mrp, erp