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I inherited an internal reporting tool. 25k lines of code that are completely uncommented, undocumented, and uses horrific design standards. "connectionString1", "connectionString2", etc. I don't even know where to start with this thing. I'm ready to put my foot down and politely request/demand a complete rewrite.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:50
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Just articulate the man hours needed to correct this error.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:58
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Spazz posted:I inherited an internal reporting tool. 25k lines of code that are completely uncommented, undocumented, and uses horrific design standards. "connectionString1", "connectionString2", etc. I don't even know where to start with this thing. I'm ready to put my foot down and politely request/demand a complete rewrite. I work in IT rather than programming but you might want to rein in your desire to rewrite: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
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Jun 8, 2015 18:59
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That mentality of "Never rewrite from scratch" doesn't really apply in this case. This isn't our flagship product, it's an internal system that is used for a dashboard to show our support ticket numbers, SLAs, etc. The issue is that it also generates our SLA reports for clients and dispatches notifications for weekends on call. It's really poorly written and difficult to navigate the codebase, so it's hard to tell what does what. There's no logging, barely any try/catches (except to re-initialize database connections). The guy who wrote it and left freely admitted that he "hobbled it together just to make it work" and all but told me to "have fun!". The on call notification system broke this past weekend and there's no rhyme or reason why. I have a feeling I could rewrite this thing in a week or two if I could dedicate my entire day to it. poo poo, I'd even work late to get it done if it meant I could be allowed to dedicate the time. I just want to have something clean to work with. For reference, this is the same guy I took over handling escalations for when he left and he gave me absolutely no clean handoffs on anything aside from a few shelvesets in TFS and 1-3 sentence notes on each ticket. No troubleshooting steps covered, no "dead ends found", nothing.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:09
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Bob Morales posted:If I won the lottery I would just run around blasting those fuckers with a shotgun. I wouldn't even care about the $1,000/bird fine. actually like most animals seagulls are cool and good
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Jun 8, 2015 19:10
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Dick Trauma posted:ICO Today I have to email my I.T. summary to the management team so I sent it to my boss to see if it needed any sanitizing since my original version was for her and the CEO. For the first "ICO" item I wrote "item closed out" and then just used "ICO" for all the ones that followed. I thought that was an elegant way to make sure everyone would know what it meant. Her comment? "I would write out ‘item closed out’ for each item. "ICO" was just short hand for my notes to you." 
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Jun 8, 2015 19:11
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mewse posted:I work in IT rather than programming but you might want to rein in your desire to rewrite: The article was written 15 years ago; between improved coding practices, higher level frameworks, and the fact that a lot of these old programs/scripts barely run without an XP VM in Admin mode, I'd take that article with a pretty hefty grain of salt. If you take a chart and plot "criticality of the application" vs "amount of the code that's properly documented and tested", you basically end up with 1 quadrant of "just loving rewrite it", 1 of "rewrite it or someone's going to take advantage of that 8 year old unpatched security hole because you're not getting support for Python 2.1 anymore" and 2 of "you better keep those documents and tests up to date because sooner or later a language update is going to break what you've got now". e: Dick Trauma posted:gently caress YOU I think you mean 
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Jun 8, 2015 20:09
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Dick Trauma posted:Today I have to email my I.T. summary to the management team so I sent it to my boss to see if it needed any sanitizing since my original version was for her and the CEO. For the first "ICO" item I wrote "item closed out" and then just used "ICO" for all the ones that followed. I thought that was an elegant way to make sure everyone would know what it meant. Her comment? I'm reevaluating this lady - you're dealing with a master level troll here.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:11
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Dick Trauma posted:Today I have to email my I.T. summary to the management team so I sent it to my boss to see if it needed any sanitizing since my original version was for her and the CEO. For the first "ICO" item I wrote "item closed out" and then just used "ICO" for all the ones that followed. I thought that was an elegant way to make sure everyone would know what it meant. Her comment? Buy her a coffee mug with ICO in big letters on it. Bonus points if the letters are in her favorite color. Make a joke out of it.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:26
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Spazz posted:That mentality of "Never rewrite from scratch" doesn't really apply in this case. This isn't our flagship product, it's an internal system that is used for a dashboard to show our support ticket numbers, SLAs, etc. The issue is that it also generates our SLA reports for clients and dispatches notifications for weekends on call. It's really poorly written and difficult to navigate the codebase, so it's hard to tell what does what. There's no logging, barely any try/catches (except to re-initialize database connections). The guy who wrote it and left freely admitted that he "hobbled it together just to make it work" and all but told me to "have fun!". The on call notification system broke this past weekend and there's no rhyme or reason why. Wanting to rewrite stuff is very seductive. But I really would caution against it, for the following reasons and more 1) In order to rewrite it, you need to understand what the first one does, otherwise you'll change behaviour without realising it. People might depend upon that behaviour, or have documented in their workflow how to handle it even if it is weird. 2) Rewrites always take longer than you'd hope. Especially if you're being called off to do other things as well. 3) Spending a week to rewrite a system that mostly works (it just sounds like it needs better understanding, docs and issue logs) doesn't add much value to the bottom line. You're just scratching an itch. Only rewrite for something like e.g. your app is in Silverlight, it needs to run in Chrome, and Chrome is removing Silverlight in Q3 of this year. It sounds like just adding comments (even if they're quizzical comments like "I think it does this") or renaming variables would be a good start.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:56
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Milotic posted:Wanting to rewrite stuff is very seductive. But I really would caution against it, for the following reasons and more
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Jun 8, 2015 21:01
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anthonypants posted:Microsoft ended development of Silverlight back in 2013 and NPAPI is twenty years old, you could use a better example. Um, that's a perfect example? You have to rewrite it, or it'll stop working - that is one of the scenarios when a throw it all out, start again approach is justified. I wasn't complaining, just pointing out a scenario. Also two years is nothing in terms of enterprise app lifetime.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:08
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We're getting Lync (skype for bznz) in a year. Don't know if I should be scared or not - I'm not the one managing it.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:13
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bobmarleysghost posted:We're getting Lync (skype for bznz) in a year. Don't know if I should be scared or not - I'm not the one managing it. Nah, it works fine for the users, except for some odd reason you can't add contacts to the Sync Mac app.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:14
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Watch this one like a hawk. Grow eyes in the back of your head. Make sure she's the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
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Jun 8, 2015 21:23
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Bob Morales posted:It's perfectly okay to be calm and unstressed but you want to avoid giving the impression that you don't care or you don't think anything is important Ynglaur posted:Some people are completely incapable of perceiving the difference. I think the reality stands somewhere in the middle. Yes it's fine to expect a certain sense of urgency and at least enough care to show that the fact they're paying you a salary means something, and obviously if you're sat there with your feet up it's not going to give that impression. But it's still relative. Yes, it's important that some workaholic who is basically killing herself with work but singlehandedly bringing in half the sales has reliable 24/7 access to her company email, for example, and it's probably best to be seen flapping around a bit if it has a problem. Important enough to really worry and stress over though? No. That's reserved for family life, personal health or if there are actual flames licking around the office... I'm not going to pretend otherwise. Anyone who realises that is just perceptive. The issue is those who really do think everything should be treated as a matter of life and death / more important than those things - speaking for our place, it's not a hospital or NASA or whatever, so life and death does not apply - it's somewhere trying to
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Jun 8, 2015 21:59
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Migishu posted:Watch this one like a hawk. Grow eyes in the back of your head. Make sure she's the first against the wall when the revolution comes. It's hard to organize a revolution when I'm distracted by a literal punchbowl full of mini dark chocolate KitKats in the kitchen.
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Jun 8, 2015 22:23
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Dick Trauma posted:It's hard to organize a revolution when I'm distracted by a literal punchbowl full of mini dark chocolate KitKats in the kitchen. So there's the bread, where's the circus?
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Jun 8, 2015 22:34
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captkirk posted:Does anyone face an internal dilemma when a user follows up after an inappropriately short amount of time? You have to choose, do you respond that day, as you planned, or do you be a dick and intentionally delay responding so as to not accidentally reinforce that behavior by appearing to reward it? Had an airman from Ramstein's Comm Focal Point call us this morning around 4am about a ticket. A major wanted to know the status of her ticket, and the notes in the ticket said the issue was pending while it was investigated. So the airman calls us for an update, but didn't seem to understand that we didn't work the ticket - our counterparts at Scott AFB worked it, and they weren't going to be in for another 4 hours. Anyways, this starts a 15 minute session of me telling them that on the weekend we actually trade off, since the maximum any one person can work in a day is 12 hours, and that the person who was assigned the ticket was doing this thing normal people call "sleeping", and that no, I was not going to call that person at home and wake them up just so the major could get a status update on her low priority ticket that was submitted yesterday (besides which, I didn't even have that number). Turns out the issue is that the major needs her Blackberry account created. When we try to access any of the server administration tools through the Blackberry web interface we get an error message that the page cannot be displayed. Our Blackberry admin is working on fixing that, because someone or something broke the web interface, and he doesn't work on the weekends so it can wait until he gets in on Monday. Account creations, unless submitted by a VIP, have a low priority, and we have something like 15 days to create them. It's been one day since the major's ticket was submitted, and going passive-aggressive by demanding status updates every couple hours pretty much guarantees she's going to the back of the line and will get handled right before the SLA expires (or maybe even beyond that if we get really annoyed - it's not like we get dinged on an SLA breach).
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Jun 8, 2015 22:38
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People still use BlackBerry? How quaint.
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Jun 8, 2015 22:43
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RadicalR posted:People still use BlackBerry? How quaint. Government still loves their crapberries. I know the US Marshals are using Good to support more modern useful devices but they still have a lot of those pieces of garbage around.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:06
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RadicalR posted:People still use BlackBerry? How quaint. The US government does because it's FIPS 140-2 certified. Apple and Samsung are both FIPS 140-1 last I heard.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:46
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bobmarleysghost posted:We're getting Lync (skype for bznz) in a year. Don't know if I should be scared or not - I'm not the one managing it. On-premise or 365?
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Jun 9, 2015 00:11
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RadicalR posted:So there's the bread, where's the circus? As much as I like bread that would work with me. No need for the circus.
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Jun 9, 2015 00:30
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flosofl posted:The US government does because it's FIPS 140-2 certified. Apple and Samsung are both FIPS 140-1 last I heard. That's exactly it, there's a bunch of security things that Blackberry does that other manufactures can't. They'll hold on long as they're able to until someone offers a decent buyout.
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Jun 9, 2015 01:22
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bobmarleysghost posted:We're getting Lync (skype for bznz) in a year. Don't know if I should be scared or not - I'm not the one managing it. Much like sharepoint, if you do your homework, everything will be fine. If you try to yolo it, you're gonna be in for a rough time.
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Jun 9, 2015 01:25
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Tab8715 posted:That's exactly it, there's a bunch of security things that Blackberry does that other manufactures can't. They'll hold on long as they're able to until someone offers a decent buyout. I'm half surprised the US Federal government hasn't just bought Blackberry already.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:19
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Ynglaur posted:I'm half surprised the US Federal government hasn't just bought Blackberry already. Canada's government would be quite peeved.
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Jun 9, 2015 04:24
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Dick Trauma posted:It's hard to organize a revolution when I'm distracted by a literal punchbowl full of mini dark chocolate KitKats in the kitchen. Send some my way as tribute to my patience
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Jun 9, 2015 04:34
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Nintendo Kid posted:Canada's government would be quite peeved. What's a little spying between neighbours, eh?
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Jun 9, 2015 05:21
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RadicalR posted:What's a little spying between neighbours, eh? It's more that they have massive investments and get pissy about "canadian companies" having too much US influence. Same sorta thinking why they require all radio stations to play minimum a certain percentage of whatever crappy Canadian bands they can scrounge up every day.
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Jun 9, 2015 05:36
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Google Search is no longer an option to be added to IE11. Why are you doing this to me?
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Jun 9, 2015 06:52
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's more that they have massive investments and get pissy about "canadian companies" having too much US influence. Same sorta thinking why they require all radio stations to play minimum a certain percentage of whatever crappy Canadian bands they can scrounge up every day. They must have been pissed when Colt bought Diemaco. Now the US even makes your guns.
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Jun 9, 2015 07:01
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22 Eargesplitten posted:They must have been pissed when Colt bought Diemaco. Now the US even makes your guns. They'd have to buy them. It's a bit embarrassing when Canada makes a better "M16" than the US.
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Jun 9, 2015 11:11
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Daylen Drazzi posted:When we try to access any of the server administration tools through the Blackberry web interface we get an error message that the page cannot be displayed. Our Blackberry admin is working on fixing that, because someone or something broke the web interface, and he doesn't work on the weekends so it can wait until he gets in on Monday. In case this is still broken, I just had this happen to mine a few weeks ago after installing KB3061518, which kills support for certs made with 512-bit DHE. See if you can access your web interface on :18180 instead of :443. If so it's the same issue and your BES admin can just regenerate the web.keystore with SHA (BB KB36882). Over the years BES has definitely made me scream enough. Thankfully it'll soon be our Exchange team's problem and not mine.
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Jun 9, 2015 13:54
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Lord Dudeguy posted:On-premise or 365? That's the thing, they only said it will be "365 or on premise", so we're left to wonder. Manslaughter posted:Much like sharepoint, if you do your homework, everything will be fine. If you try to yolo it, you're gonna be in for a rough time. That's a good note actually.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:29
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I'm pretty sure this loving Microsoft technician has been on PTO more in the last month than I have in two years. Almost every time I try to follow up on my ticket I get an OOO response, so I finally CC all of his managers in his OOO response. Surprise surprise, all of them are OOO. gently caress.
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Jun 9, 2015 14:36
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10-character usernames because AS\400 Would really love for these fucks to be able to sign in with their email address instead.
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Jun 9, 2015 15:28
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Spazz posted:I'm pretty sure this loving Microsoft technician has been on PTO more in the last month than I have in two years. Almost every time I try to follow up on my ticket I get an OOO response, so I finally CC all of his managers in his OOO response. Surprise surprise, all of them are OOO. End of Fiscal Year this month for a lot of companies. People hit high numbers early in the FY to make accounting spreadsheets look good then take their vacation at the end of it so they never get nastygrams from accounts about being below target YTD.
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Jun 9, 2015 16:45
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Bob Morales posted:10-character usernames because AS\400 The 400 supports AD/Kerberos based single sign on! (lolol j/k you'll never be able to use that based on your crazy 400 guy stories)
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Jun 9, 2015 16:53
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