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I’ve been put back on a project that I thought I was clear of. I’m not particularly fussed about being on it. But they have no viable plan to get the system to where it needs to be. This is not good for me.
A couple of issues have been building up and I am afraid of them just blowing up in someones hands.
* Build Scripts
* Documentation
* Change management
The build scripts are old. Everyone in the software industry knows that most things change, including the way things are built. I’m sure the build scripts were perfect for the initial stages of the system but they haven’t changed since. The problem is that the Owners (notice I’m trying to be generic?) of the project won’t spend any time (and money) cleaning up the outer edges of the project.
The documentation hasn’t really been kept up to date, but since the software hasn’t changed that much it hasn’t caused much of an issue. The problem is managing the documentation. Commiting OO documents to CVS makes it difficult to see changes between versions. It also makes it difficult (if not impossible) to merge documents. I asked around at work and the common answer was wiki. Wiki is good but we would lose things like table of contents (and page numbers), branding, levelled numbering and simple things like bookmarking. I tried to suggest the !boom thing on one of the blogs on byteclub that combines css and html to produce PDF but the overhead of time would probably be too great.
With regards to change management, this is more of a niceity that may come in handy at some point. There is no solid record of what has change and/or why. Since there has been none to start with, it is kind of hard to work out what I should do about it. If I had more motivation coming from the Business behind the project, I might be more interested: but this is not the case.
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