Saturday, November 27, 2004

Argh the frustration!

I can understand software developers becoming schizophrenic and affected with multiple personality disorders. We often have people attacking us for blame or "why doesn't this do that?" and then we have such conflicting rules in our lives like "meet the impossible deadline but don't neglect the documentation or quality." One of my favorite quality assurance quotes is "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month."

My roots are in software quality assurance but I'm basically a developer now. I know why and how to document software but we all know that often budget ($) and time just don't allow for the documentation and correct coding.

But it's so infuriating when you have to take on a project that is undocumented and obfuscated! I'm on what should be a simple simple project but the previous developer went 'include happy' (that is, writing 5-25 lines of code in one file and including it in another but not reusing it anywhere else) and tried to write this object oriented. This project did not deem the need for object oriented code. I'm about to pull my hair out.