In a galaxy far-far away, this incident happened:
A web application was needed and created for a certain department. It was supposed to be up an running within a year. The application still was not running after 2 years…, and a certain developer who shall remain nameless, inherited the application for completion.
The developer was baffled when he looked at the application. He had a couple of problems:
- The application was found all over the place, development server, production server, different locations within the development server, and various different versions. He had no clue which files were the ones to work with.
- The application was started by a student, who had to leave because his/her co-op term finished after a few months, only to be continued by a consultant who also had to leave. End results: a complete mess, partly working application, a jumble of HTML, and scattered pieces of files that our poor developer had to figure out.
Our developer then met with the client, fixed the functional problems, found which files ware actually needed to function and still had a headache trying to figure out the HTML. Of course, he would like nothing better than to start all over with the application, but that would be time consuming. So the developer had to continue working on the messed up HTML, trying to fix it, since a specific designer is not available.
Moral of the story:
- Have complete documentation of applications that you are working on. This helps the next person coming in to know what you’ve done and what’s to be done.
- If you’re not very good at design, ask for a good designer to help with the HTML part. Do not allow developers to act as designers because it’s generally not their strong suite. What ends up happening is jumbled HTML that nobody can fix that easily. Of course, this works vice versa…
- If you don’t have the resources to complete a project, then identify this at the beginning so things like developers acting as designers don’t happen.
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