I just got back to work from a week long training course on Oracle PL/SQL programming. It was a good time getting away from the job. I checked in with my team to see how we were doing. There are a lot of open trouble tickets from the customer. The sheer volume of tickets is making us look bad. I am not losing much sleep over this. We are understaffed. Management accepted some new tasks which took time away from bug fixing. Now the project is suffering because of it.My team lead asked me if I could find some trouble tickets which looked easy to fix and knock them out. That way we could ship them in the software release which is going out tomorrow. I decided to fix one such trouble ticket that way. The problem with the one I was fixing quick was that there way some hard coded data in a resource file.
Now the best way to solve this problem is to ensure the data is not hard coded in the resource file. We can use some build variables which contain the changing numbers, and get the resource strings to be built from them. The problem is that you do not knock out such a change in a couple minutes. This is my dilemma.
I could take the time to engineer the best solution. In the long run, it would help us to not encounter the same problem again in the future when the hard coded data gets stale. The customer hates old problems popping back up. However this would me I would be holding up the build. And there would be one extra trouble ticket open.
In the end, I decided to hack a fix for this problem by hard coding the new values that are valid for today. This does not sit well with me. In the software development world, this means the project is incurring technical debt. You let too much debt like this pile up, and you end up bankrupt. Nobody likes that. Perhaps I can make amends by doing the correct fix later this week. That will still take some effort since we still have a lot of other trouble tickets open which are crucial.
