Pre-release mayhem – some things never change
For last six month my guys and I have been under extreme pressure. You see, in the ideal world, sales have no control over development, but this is a real world so sales objective is driving us completely mad. There is a potential client, a very demanding potential client who blackmails us with stuff like “If you not going to build feature x by date y I am not signing”. Unfortunately this is the biggest contract for us, so sales will do everything in their power to get them. It’s not that I mind sales guys doing their jobs, but if this client is demanding right now and they have not paid yet, I can only imagine what will be unleashed upon us once they will become our paying customer.
Granted the product is very expensive (more expensive then VS 2008 and Adobe CS3 suite combined) and this sometimes can inspire our clients to demand stuff. We’ve been through this before. A company that shell remain nameless was bossing us around for six month. We only worked on their features, nobody else wanted these things and at the end of six month they said, “You know, this is what we said we need, but not what we actually need”. I can still remember that conversation. Incidentally this is the time when my first “Punch Box” appeared at the office; since then we went though a number of “Punch Boxes” and that was the end of that.
Three times in the last 4 years we went through similar situations, and we have yet secure a contract when too much custom stuff is put in and we basically keep on asking “How high”. This is the fourth time.
We have to release a newest version on Tuesday, Sept 30, so everyone is up to their necks in testing and bug fixing when all of a sudden “dll hell” makes appearance. Everyone who coded for Windows knows what I am talking about – one guy decides to mess around with perfectly good reference and all hell breaks loose. Today its Microsoft.Office.Core. Nobody can compile, nothing runs, and we can’t roll back. Unfortunately we have to rely on external references such as Office.Core, because the app produces Excel and PowerPoint documents, we reference other things too, but it seems to me that whenever we are running into DLL Hell it always have something to do with a dll from Microsoft. This is going to be a long weekend, just me, five guys, IDE and references.