Digitally Born

Things have quieted down immensely since my first post about how much I was working. Which is good, but for mixed reasons.

In a nutshell, 20 of us had been working balls out on a project that consisted of rewriting an existing application to make it object-oriented, clean, fast and easier to maintain. That sounds good and all .. except that the application was constantly developed over 5 years. We were given roughly 8 months. We started, if I remember correctly, with 5 developers. Last month we had 20. As the deadline came closer it became painfully clear how much was overlooked, underestimated or simply wrong. Really, the problem was a snowball thrown long before any work was done. The complexity of the project was compounded by the over-simplicity of the documentation.

Finally, the client had their “point of no return” meeting where they decided whether to launch the new application or to continue for another full year with the old (we had a small window of time to launch the new application) and they decided on the latter. Awesome.

So .. the team has been downsized and split into two .. half continuing the new application, the other half on the old. Now, after being on the project for 9 months, we finally have the time we need to do things the right way.