Software Pre-Release Jitters
I'm putting the final touches on my latest project at work: revamping our logging and test report generation utilities. This was originally going to be a two month project wrapping our existing utilities with some new ideas. Due to technical issues it turned into a six month revamp effort.
What bothers me is that most of our users will just want to know how to use the new utilities. That hasn't changed a whole lot. So I'll probably end up with a bunch of users (and managers) wondering what caused the big delay. The big changes are for people who want to extend the utilities to log custom information and tweak the test reports. Unfortunately this is a much smaller group of people.
It makes me wonder whether the delay will have been worth it. Will these utilities inspire people to take advantage of the extensibility or will they keep looking to our group for every little change? I'm not holding my breath. Sometimes I wonder if my next batch of business cards will have the 'Lead Tool' title on them. :-( I much prefer the 'Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles' title. :-)
At least I had a chance to break from previous conventions and write some well-designed code. Hopefully it can be used as an example for improved software design practices.
What bothers me is that most of our users will just want to know how to use the new utilities. That hasn't changed a whole lot. So I'll probably end up with a bunch of users (and managers) wondering what caused the big delay. The big changes are for people who want to extend the utilities to log custom information and tweak the test reports. Unfortunately this is a much smaller group of people.
It makes me wonder whether the delay will have been worth it. Will these utilities inspire people to take advantage of the extensibility or will they keep looking to our group for every little change? I'm not holding my breath. Sometimes I wonder if my next batch of business cards will have the 'Lead Tool' title on them. :-( I much prefer the 'Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles' title. :-)
At least I had a chance to break from previous conventions and write some well-designed code. Hopefully it can be used as an example for improved software design practices.