Category: Software Development

Yesterday I spent the day with my good friend and colleague from my group to work on some coding for the project. Let me just say from the outset that I respect this colleague for their technical prowess and their hard work ethic and this blog does not reflect upon this opinion.

The blog starts with my colleague explaining to me how he had facilitated the design and got a very early prototype of our program working. He explained the tribulations with the Gentle framework and the My Generation tool he and the team member from the other team used last week to turn our database design into a living breathing, business class and database persistence code.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take me long to find that there has been a cost. And lets say that cost makes a kind of high pitched ‘screeching sound’ in my brain whenever I here details about it.

First up, the table names and columns have been renamed. ‘Gentle is sensitive to case’. Okey doke, so we inherit a naming convention for ourselves that gets rid of MS SQL’s stupid mixed-case, spaces-allowed convention, hooray!  

Then, the database foreign key columns have been renamed to include the _id suffix. This went against what I thought was great pains last week to explain to them why I intentionally left the _id suffix off. The field names in the class for foreign key references are to be the type of the related object with a descriptive name. They weren’t to be primitive types which just stored the ID.

The db column name doesn’t matter too much since you can configure Gentle to use any column name. But the end result what my concern is.

The Good way means, you can just do something like Membership.getPerson().getName(). It’s already loaded in one swoop into memory when you load the membership. You can use a generation tool to make your code and it picks up on this aspect. (Well perhaps any tool except My Generation)

The Bad way means that you have to go, Person.Retrieve(membership.getPersonId()).getName() after you’ve had to already do a Membership.Retrieve(). Two retrieve calls versus one.

Any database framework worth its pinch of salt in my mind should load in the entire object and all the related collections (objects on the many end of a one to many relationship), not just save and persist the key, making it the developers responsibility to not only maintain the references are correct. In my code, I want to work with my objects, in my database I want to work with keys. The guys have missed the whole point of using a framework here.

Apparently, Gentle or My Generation (they use the term interchangeably, you’d think its one program — another minor screech), needs to see the _id otherwise it wont build list methods from it.

Sccccccccrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaachhhhhhhhhhhhh

This is no biggie, I hold my tongue at this stage. They have missed a golden opportunity, I think. Hey I could be arrogant and wrong…. or just arrogant.

Oh, there is another thing, Gentle/My Generation needs the primary keys to be marked as IDENTITY columns so that they autonumber. (I later learn that MS SQL doesn’t have a CREATE SEQUENCE syntax like some other DB’s do). That’s fair enough, they defined a few sequences.

“We couldn’t figure out how to do it in TOAD, so we just changed the database directly and uploaded the database image backup to SVN… we don’t need the database diagram anymore”

Sccccccccrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaachhhhhhhhhhhhh

I start fuming inside, given that the version of the database diagram they used do generate the code has been already out of date. It’s lacked columns and renames I’ve done over the last week. These amendments I’ve done were minor, but they were based on the feedback that Dave gave us when Andy took the design for review.

Scccccccc—-rrrrrrrrrr——-eeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaa———chhhhhhhhhhhhh

“Why didn’t you upload your file to SVN?” I ask.

“I couldn’t, I kept getting this error”. I look on his laptop, and see that there is a small yellow exclamation mark next to the Database Schema file. He then motioned to commit. The error message, to me anyway, tells me that his checkout is out of date, and he needs to do an update first. He does this. He gets another error message telling him that the file is in conflict with another recent change (mine) and he needs to merge it. He then brushes off the error reiterating that we don’t need Toad anymore since we’ve started developing.

schhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhwwwwwwwww
eeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaccccccccccccchhhhhh
hhhhhh.  TScshhhhwwwwweeeeeeewwwweeeeeeeee
eeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaatttttccccccccccccccccccc
cchhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I then proceed to explain that we still need those diagrams. For one, it is the documentation that will appear in our data dictionary, and follow on to the souls that will be doing work for this client next semester. Another point is that I have spent some time adding notes and column descriptions to the Toad model, and again, this documentation will come to help us or the future maintainers of the system later on.

My colleague recognises that those are important points but can’t validate their importance since given the short timeframe we have; ‘the clients indecision has ‘forced’ us into taking these shortcuts’. The changes I’ve made are relatively minor, why don’t we just add them to the un-commited, ‘more up-to-date’ file that my colleague has?

Toad has a useful compare function so we can quickly view these differences. It quickly becomes apparent that not much of the Toad schema has been modified at all but rather the changes to get the My Generation tool to work have all been done at the database level. The case names are still mixed case whereas the database is in lower, and there is the obvious lack of identifier fields. There are now dozens of changes because of this. Also, my colleague has added another table to represent the username and password field that I had added to the person entity in the version of the database schema he couldn’t see because he had a merge conflict he didn’t know how to get rid of.

Sccrrreeeeech. (One for me, I take some responsibility for only showing them the basics. But I did give them links to some really good guides, which told you what that fricken conflict icon meant in a second…. Why are people afraid to read manuals?)

Twwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwiiiiiiiiiiiii

ieeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiinnnnnccccccccccccccccchhhh

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
(If only your parents enrolled you in some more team sports as a kid or made you get off that computer as a kid, not that I can talk, so you could express yourself more clearly and realise the importance of keeping everyone on the same page….wait a sec, am I getting mad at him?, or just that he reminds me of a younger version of me???) 

The Toad file and the database schema that our only working code runs on are completely different. This leaves us with only one option, reverse engineer that database into Toad, then add the changes I made. The only problem is that now, we not only have the toad file to worry about, we also have to update the column and class names that were autogenerated by My Generation. But since we’ve started modifying these classes, using My Generation again to get the code into sync is out of the question, since it would write over those business classes and custom logic!  

Tsccccccchwwwwwwwwwwwwwnnnn

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Whilst I still keep my comments to myself, my expression has changed considerably. My colleague, noticing my frustration asks what the matter is. It’s hard to express my disappointment, because I wasn’t there when they performed this work. They did what they could, with the tools they had, and they thought they did a reasonable job considering. My colleague offers that the changes they made weren’t the most ideal way of doing things, but that the looming time constraints have made the shortcuts justifiable.

I can appreciate this position, sort of, but from my experience, not that it is much broader than theirs if at all, tells me that this sort of mashing is a great way to lead to errors and bugs in the code. I can’t give this my blessing, yet I can’t find the words, nor the justification to scrap the work they have already done and rewrite the business layer and persistence in a more reusable, TESTABLE!!!!, maintainable way. All I see/hear, is shortcuts to get the code to compile and the program to run. In the long run, I see the client not signing off on UAT because the thing falls over, or worse, they sign off and the thing breaks after its deployed, if were lucky to keep this jalopy afloat for long enough to the deploy stage. This goes against what I’ve seen as a software developer in the workforce, and as what I’ve been taught as a uni student.  

Q?: If you were on the Titanic, would you have told the guy that asked to increase the speed of the ship, which ultimately led it to being unavailable to avoid the iceberg, to piss off with his ‘lets get to america faster to show off this new boat’ request…

Thoughts of the risk seminar, the RMIT student admin project disaster and Dave Grants question during that seminar, ring in my mind. If they know better, why do they revert to using crap practises??? 
 

SC Ignorance REE is EEC bliss CHH

Its been about 2 hours since we’ve started. We haven’t even started coding like we planned yet. Grudgingly I agree to hold my tongue in order for us to get any work done. I ask to take a look at the code….

NO CLASS INHERITANCE HAS BEEN IMPLEMENTED BECAUSE THE DATABASE PERSISTANCE FRAMEWORK OR PIECE OF CRAP AUTOMATIC CODE GENERATOR CAN’T HANDLE SUBCLASSES. THERE WILL BE NO USE OF ANY POLYMORPHISM IN OUR CODE (and all code reuse benefits that come from it) BECAUSE EACH CLASS MAPS DIRECTLY TO ONE DATABASE TABLE. WHEN WE CODE, WE MUST CODE THE LOGIC THAT LINKS THE RELATED SUB/SUPERCLASSES TOGETHER. (Why don’t we just write the program in C?). OUR METHODS WILL TAKE THE SUPER CLASS + LOWER LEVEL CLASS AS PARAMETERS, THEY WILL HAVE SWITCH, IFS and LOOPS TO HANDLE EACH DIFFERENT TYPE OF SUBCLASS, THEY WILL REQUIRE 3 TIMES THE TEST CASES TO TEST ALL THE EXTRA CODE WE NEED TO WRITE TO DO THINGS THIS WAY. (so we wont bother with unit testing, just write a local application we can use to manually test the control layer functions in a system testing fashion)

All because of the time restrictions that have been placed on us by the client. Its not how we would do it in an ideal world, but lets do it in a completely stupid way that will take longer in the end because we don’t have enough time in the first place. 2 + 2 = 5. We don’t need to write unit tests, we don’t have the time.

Yeah, since you put it that way, that sounds perfectly fine to me. I forgot to add one thing….  

TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSCWWWWW
WWWWWWWWWCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEETTTTTTTTTTTTTTCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
EEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWRTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTWWWWWW
WWWWWWWWWWWWCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCSSSSSSSSSSSSWWWWWWW
WWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAACCCCCCCCCCCAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Yes, I’ve been told for using sarcasm, it’s a poor mans humour I know, not funny and I’m sorry)

What I did after that was look for the nearest chalkboard. Perhaps I could get my colleague to understand if I could demonstrate the sound in my ears. The closest thing I could find was an electrical fuse box, I stood on my chair, and started scratching at its panel.

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Believe it or not, we did actually get some work done after that. We now have a new database policy that is designed to only work on the source TOAD file and propagate the changes automagically without intervening in the database directly. It is the responsibility of everyone to keep in sync with the changes and to update their own changes as soon as possible.

As I read over this blog, I realise the bitterness has taken over, I have become what I vowed I wouldn’t. Then again, I got the new Nine Inch Nails record last week. This depressing emo attitude, could be somehow linked to this new music I’ve been digesting recently. Ha!

Our client, an IT industry group, commissions a system and in the end has no place to put it.

It doesn’t bother me too much. Mistakes happen, people make arrangements that they don’t fully understand then come to realise that those arrangements aren’t suitable. That’s exactly what happened with us.

But then I ask myself…. What is the cost of these mistakes and omissions and more importantly who ends up paying for the system in the end???.

Lets see, we are getting paid a grand total of $0 per hour. But, this project is funded by the state government. The state government is funded by the taxes we pay through our normal jobs.

In fact, I am not working for free, I’m paying them via taxes which are spent on this project. And this project has led me to be dicked around because funnily enough, an IT industry group can’t find a web host. Insert tones of Fred Flinstone grumbling.

The fact that I’ve hit this rock bottom, scraping up excuses and likenesses to Fred Flinstone is not helped by the lack of communication, or the zero take-up of responsibility by the client to chariot the cause and find another solution where there initial one failed.

Alright, so enough of this smellfest, lets put it in perspective.

What could we have done from the start to alleviate the problem?

1. Set the technology from the get go. No matter how ridiculous sounding, having something instead of nothing leads to an open discussion about reasonable leads and makes the client understand their commitment from the beginning. The solution to all hardware requirements is a chess champion beating mainframe. After that, let the client come back and negotiate with us if they think our selected platform is too expensive.
   1. Get commitment early on about the platform, similarly as you would have consensus with the client about the intent of the system you are to build. The platform is tied into the end product, and so the features follow on from it. But rather than say, well we need to know the platform and we can’t do X, Y & Z without it, tell the truth. We want this platform and we’ll push and shitfight all the way because X, Y & Z could be done by any talented coder in any language, but we know we can lazily do X, Y & Z with more ease if we strongly push our preferred one. It’s like going for a job. A Java developer won’t necessarily go for ASP.NET if they’ve never programmed in it before. If jobs were scarce and they were cluey, they’d bring themselves up to speed in .NET and have a go at it, but it wouldn’t be without looking at the Java options first.
2. We had this opportunity to elect the platform at the beginning and we didn’t go about it the right way. What we ended up doing was taking time to find out each others allegiances and technologies each were comfortable in. More importantly, we thought that we had to work with the clients existing host, and in our eagerness to impress by integrating, wasted time waiting for specs that would never come.
3. Initially this point was going to be about picking a platform for your team, sticking with it and forcing your choice on the client, but after writing a few paragraphs justifying that thought, I realise we have a mole in our ranks. Someone who is pushing one particular platform. Maybe a nest of mole’s. The rest of the team don’t hold an allegiance per se, but do hold a resistance to learning new platforms and I fucking hate it. Out of what I thought was fairness, I supported the choice of platform to appeal to everyone’s need of familiarity. But really, as you get more experienced (and I think 3rd year uni students have enough experience), they should be grabbing new platforms like Eve takes apples from a serpent. Yum, yum, stuff the consequences.
4. If you know your team are going to be shitty if you push the above point, then just pick the consensus platform and push that. Similar to the push a mainframe scenario in point 1, except instead of the client coming back saying its too much, it’ll be the developers crying because those last pieces aren’t fitting together as easily as they thought. At least when the seams start to appear, they will have now learnt a valuable lesson and future projects will benefit because of it.

    
    

   So in summary, if you don’t want problems with your platform, be rich, obnoxious and proud. Then you’ll just have problems with yourself, not the wider stakeholder community.

    
    

   Edit: Today there was good news on the hosting front. The client, not our direct liaison, but a member of that organisation all the same took the ball and gave us the commitment in terms of host we needed to start developing.

I took the opportunity to listen to play back our interview notes from the first two meetings. Since I volunteered to do mock up reports to find out what extra data we hadn’t yet considered for the ‘domain model’, it made sense.

Shock horror, our tutors were right. There is a plethora of things that the client wants. They don’t know how to ask for it. But they are concerned with the demographic of memberships.

On a good note, the client has been good and got in touch with our host over the last week. The host has assigned the client a new account manager and I’ve been able to forward our requests, which are now sitting with their ‘technical department’.

Yesterday began with adventures in HiFi.

This was good because the drones had alleviated my need to extrapolate the beginnings of a fine art form.

Then 4 wise men appeared. They thanked us for the food and left. Their gifts were going to some baby. I later heard only 3 of them reached their destination. The 4th guy spilt the oil.

If only time had a place within my spice rack. It would sit well against the tins of SPAM underneath. Why not, because? Yesterday, Ok!

HiFi, yeah!….. Your team member has lost the plot. Put it in the risk report.