In the past I worked in an environment that had a very fast development
pace which created high stress and, ultimately, some developer
turnover. My current job is not like that at all and this is both
good (for me) and bad (for deadlines).
We have only a small team (2 .NET developers, 2 green screen developers
and 1 technical writer), but so did my last job. At that place I
managed a complete rewrite and documentation of the inventory module's
UI, and the creation of a fully featured windows control that
graphically represented the inventory environment, in under 2 months.
I rolled into this new team with the work ethic and urgency that I was
accustomed to from the past and, in the first month, created a database
driven reporting environment from scratch. This was quite
involved as it has all information about the selection criteria, data
gathering (queries) and report configurations, stored in the
database. In that time I even created functionality that allowed
for database defined, event driven filtering of selection criteria,
plus the ability for hyperlinks in reports to open secondary reports
with linked data. The whole module was a challenge considering I
had to do an internal business analysis of the software's needs, train
management on the ways of modern reporting tools, learn DataDynamic's
Active Reports for .NET (I've been a Crystal developer in the past) and
I had to create reports for a convention at the end of that one month
period. Still, I did this without any overtime. Since the
rollout for the convention, I've finished up the reports that were
required and I've created a rather nice admin tool for configuring the
reporting system.
This week was rather slow and I noticed that slow is the pace set by
the other .NET developer. Sure I don't know what other forces are
at work during that individual's work day, but you should be able to
make some progress on the main project. In the past 2 to 3 weeks
all that that developer has done for the project is create the data
shema for the Inventory module. At this pace, if all they did was
create schemas, we'd have the data structure for the system drawn up
sometime around the end of May. Remember, that would include no
UI or datalayer programming, and the targeted release time is October
or November of this year!
All in all, I'm not stressed about work anymore, but I sure don't get anything done there.
posted @ Saturday, February 12, 2005 3:50 AM