About six weeks ago, against better judgement I agreed to help a family friend out with a “small” mobile application that his company had outsourced to India for development. To cut to the chase, the point of all that follows is to trust your gut. As evidence I present two items, the first is this post, the second is a much more scientific approach as described by the WSJ.
The first indication that this was a bad idea came when I was given the set of documentation that existed for the product. This “set” included a single Visio document with an artists rendition of what the final product would like like along with rough scenarios detailing usage of each screen. The second piece of documentation was the email within which the Visio was included. The email read, and I quote “I want it to work like this.” I would soon learn that my project would be considered succesful when the product “worked like this.”
Gut comment number 1: He can’t give you good requirements, don’t take the project.
The second indication of good things to come occurred upon receipt of the code base. After unzipping the zip file, I discovered that the C# project was full of .vb files.
Gut comment number 2: He said this was written in C# and it is VB (is that even considered a real language???), Don’t Take The Project.
The third indication of even better things to come was the response received after notifying said family friend of two things, the code was written in VB, and there were 2 comments in the entire solution. The response to the question, can you send me the technical documentation was “I already sent it to you, that was the Visio.” (!#$!#@$%)
Gut comment number 3: There is no technical documentation showing how this thing works in a macro, or micro sense. DON’T TAKE THE PROJECT.
These type of incidents have continued for the last six weeks, and have continued through this wonderful weekend. The culmination of all the hours I had invested in improving this product came on Thursday evening. Upon requesting the mobile device for testing, the pseudo-project manager arrived at my house with said device in tow. Soon he was showing me how to recreate the “bugs” (how do you have a bug without requirements, sorry I digress) and other various improvements (not documented of course other than on a post-it note. Sorry, I digressed again!) that he would like made. I said no problem, and proceeded to make said bug fixes and software improvements as he sat on the floor in my office and tested each fix as I made it. In addition to this, he did it while on speaker phone with the developer working on the back end application. All this was done between the hours of 8 PM and 11 PM, during which time my 13 month old child (whose room is less than 5 feet away ) was attempting to sleep. It was on the third time that he was awakened, and with quite an angry glare from me that the pseudo-project manager said, “Oh, I didn’t realize he was sleeping. My kids don’t go to sleep until we do.” (!@#$%!%%^!!!)
Gut comment number 637: Never again fail to listen to me! And you should probably punch that guy in the face for making such an asinine comment at 10:30 PM while you are working on his non-documented, VB coded, poorly architected, really really really really crappy application.
1 year ago
