Hey Chris,
At Notch8 we talk about the (somewhat crudely named) bus problem all the
time. What happens when a developer gets hit by a bus? One thing we do here is
to have other developers on the team and to fight against silos ("Don't touch
that module, I maintain that") as much as possible. When I was solo I paid a
few other devs to get together quarterly and just review the app so they know
about it.
The bus problem is actually one of the selling points of Rails in my mind.
The more standard framework means that someone new to the project at least has
a chance of being able to figure out what is going on. That doesn't mean you
can't write spaghetti Rails of course, it is just a little less common.
Best,
Rob
On Dec 13, 2012, at 10:04 AM, Chris McCann <[email protected]> wrote:
> SD Ruby,
>
> I think it's a pretty common situation where a solo Rails dev builds a
> somewhat business-critical application for the client and then maintains and
> improves it over time for possibly many years, usually as the only developer
> with working knowledge of the application.
>
> But being mostly young and healthy I'm wondering if the issue of continuity
> plans comes up much between Rails devs and their clients. I recently lost a
> good friend in a bicycle accident (he was all of 45) and that made me
> contemplate my mortality a bit. His wife was incredibly brave at the
> memorial and one thing she said stuck with me -- she and her husband had
> discussed all the "what ifs" so they'd have peace of mind should something
> terrible happen. Well, it did happen, and she was executing their plan.
>
> One of my clients asked me a few years ago what my continuity plan was should
> something happen to me. Being a single point of fleshy failure I responded
> by asking a developer friend of mine if he'd step in to help them under those
> circumstances, and he agreed to do so.
>
> That dev has since moved out of state and, lo and behold, the client asked me
> today to provide them more formal documentation on my continuity plan since
> the application is being used by more and more of their nationwide membership
> and the data in it is critical to the organizations daily operations. I'm
> also charging them a bit more money for my development and consulting
> services as a result.
>
> So, my questions to SD Ruby are:
> - How have you dealt with the issue of continuity?
> - What expectations do you set with the clients?
> - How do you make sure everything someone would need to at least step in as a
> caretaker of your code base could do so with you completely out of the
> picture?
>
> I think as professional software and web developers we owe it to our clients
> to address these types of scenarios anytime we're doing something non-trivial
> for them. I'd love to hear the community's input.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris
>
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