Life as usual… until

Several months had passed. The two developers began to develop a template for creating applications and creating information that “only they would know”. They were gaining a reputation of being the only people that “could find the answers” to the ever demanding needs of the management staff for information.

After several months one very urgent request arrived from the executive team. An audit was in process and they needed reports. GD and AL were summoned to create the reports for that first application that they had created months ago and ASAP!

AL and GD began trying to remember the details that were supposed to be in their head of “personal files’ about that first application. They couldn’t.

They decided that they would create a matrix of what they remembered on paper to try and meet the deadline. But, a good portion of the puzzle remained unsolved.

The developers had to decipher their own code to back trace the proper relationships to create the [queries] which would feed the reports. In essence, they reverse engineered their project just to create reports that should have been easily created!

When all is said and done…

In the end, the executive team was not impressed. The reports were late, and their other projects fell behind due to the extra time that needed to be spent trying to decipher the mess they had created. To make matters worse, the newly hired IT Director had a new directive to make sure this never happened again. GD and AL fell from the front of the line of the trusted developers to the very end of the line (and eventually out the door).

What Happened???

What was the problem? To be specific… the developers had created tables and indexes that were not easily associated together by their labels.

For example (not exact names to protect the innocent), instead of associating an address table with a company table they created a table called A9123 to hold the addresses and a B9182 table to hold the company names. In addition, the identifiers (much like card catalog numbers) were not easily understood. This is the equivalent of calling a “Cat” a “Barkle” (or some non-related name) or a house “itemA9Z1”.

Basically, the developers needed a “secret decoder” ring just to figure out what each item that the management team wanted to have reported.