Good Tuesday to you all, For those that remember that far back - I made a posting here yesterday, with a little database file that was mailed around from one computer to another computer during development.
What that posting ended up being was the culmination of a failed software development project! The database was to meet very simple requirements - track exercises one had performed on a daily basis. The person wanting to create this little database made only one UI specification ( big words make everything sound better, don't they ) As always the database needed to run in a mixed environment, as exampled by the requesters comment: "--I'm running Base on both Vista and Ubuntu boxes. OpenOffice is part of my strategy to move away from closed-source applications .... " To the development team, it didn't seem to be a failed project - right up the moment of release. It worked on all four of the computers used for development and testing, they say. It did fail initial release however - unquestioningly. It failed it's initial release because of 1 line of code in a 3 line procedure. ( release 2 by the way will be on the ftp server later today ) The first user outside of the team however, reported a serious bug with the application logic and some minor problems with display of forms on his workstation. ( Thank you so much Zoltan. ) The second reported a catastrophic anomaly - traced back by customer support staff to their failure to copy - paste the 22 line Basic program needed to run two of he data entry forms. After a quick release of a patch ( under an hour ), the primary customer for the application is up and running, enjoying what they got - as his response notes: "it definitely fits the bill, and I'll have some fun picking it apart and learning how things tick. " Pretty high falutt'n terms for a little Base file and 22 lines of Basic macros, you might say. Of course the development team was one person on four computers ( me ), the QA staff was one person ( me ), and the customer support was...well - me. But I contend that for a desktop database development tool, such as Base, the whole scenario ( hopefully minus the 'failure' part ) captures a reasonable percentage of likely uses in small to medium sized companies. For the small firm ( say 3 business locations and 50 employees ) chances are that the means of distribution for anything electronic is email. They have networks at each location, but these are simple LAN's and not likely to 'directly' connect with each other. I use the term 'directly' because it is also true that data is passed from one of these sites to the other - but this is performed by some vendor application. The actual employees would have no idea how to mount a remote disk, open a socket to another machine or even use remote service. They do everything local, make a self contained package as best they can and email it to co-workers at the other locations. At the medium sized firms ( say 7 locations and 1500 employees ) they are going to have some type of backbone connecting the computing resources at each location to each other. They spend money on this, that includes paying salary for network administrators. These network administrators each have responsibility for their local office - and of course they all have a boss that is responsible for the 'company backbone'. What that means for our user is that even if they did know something about, mounting, opening or remote invocation those darn administrators actually have restrictions of what can be done from one LAN to another on the backbone...security you know, and although the policies for gaining access to remote computers are not highly restrictive, just having the extra step(s) in their work flow renders them back to the comfort of the - work local, package, send via email scenario for small projects. That might be something to consider for those that want to ask the question, "Does program logic embedded in documents make sense?", per Friday's GullFOSS blog entry. Now it would be correct to ask - What does all that have to do with the fact that I can't write 22 lines of Basic without mucking the whole thing up? Good question, and I will try to answer it over the next couple of days. Here a few of the things I hope to touch on: How did those atrocious 3 lines of code get the project? Put another way - Why did I even need those 22 lines? That question and some thoughts I have on it will be for tomorrow's mail. A couple of other things I would like to talk to you folks about are: What should I have done to ensure that each of the four computers used to develop and test was not using a 'local' copy of those 2 macros? How should I have distributed that package so that no one needed to contact customer support..*chuckle*..me in other words, just to install it? How would I address the need, if or when it arises, to support both the current user who speaks English and say someone who uses Hungarian? Do I really want to make two physical Base files? Thanks Drew
