Our customer gave us some new requirements with a short turn around time. A developer performed some rapid application development to code up a GUI. Then this developer quit. Another developer tried to pick up where he left off. However he was unsuccessful. So I was given the task. I have a week to deliver it to internal testing.The original developer told me where he left off. There were some GUI control issues in adding next records. And he confessed that he did not know what to do for an update. To figure out where we really were, I tested what we had. The add code did not work due to the GUI control issue. And update did not seem to do anything.
I am not starting from nothing. There is some code which reads and displays data in the database. However there seems to be a lot of work to do. The add code was not working due to some broken validation in the front end. The update was not working because there was no code behind the screens. My big mission was to code up this update processing.
This application uses OLE DB to access the database. I have used OLE DB before. But I am not strong in it. The goal was to get this done in a week. The customer does not care how elegant my code is. So I decided to just cut and paste some working OLE DB code. Then I hacked at it until the update processing seemed to work.
Testing of the update processing uncovered some deficiencies. The work was split up into a GUI front end and some back end stored procedures. The back end was coded and declared complete. However as soon as I got my update code working, I determined that the back end update processing was broken. Luckily I had another back end developer that could fix these bugs as I proceeded with the front end.
I thought I might not be able to make the week long delivery. However things are looking up. The breakthrough was when I decided to cut and paste working code to expedite coding. The other advantage was to only work on the pressing issues to make the basics work.
