The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Passing Messages

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-05-30

About 15 years a go, I had this job where I was requested to set up and administer an MQ connection from our company to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). Since I had no prior experience with MQ, I picked up the manual, learned a few commands, and in a day or so, had a script to create queue managers, queues, disk backing stores, etc. I got the system analysts (SA's) at both ends on the phone and in ten minutes had connectivity to their test and production environments. Access was applied for and granted to relevant individuals and applications, and application coding could begin.

Pyramid of Caius Cestius exterior, showing the giant wall which blocks everything

I didn't know the full and complete way to manage most of the features of MQ, but I had figured out enough to properly support what we needed. Total time was 2.5 man-days of effort.

33 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-07

Business Driven Development

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-05-23

Every now and then, you come across a special project. You know the sort, where some business user decides that they know exactly what they need and exactly how it should be built. They get the buy-in of some C-level shmoe by making sure that their lips have intimate knowledge of said C-level butt. Once they have funding, they have people hired and begin to bark orders.

About 8 years ago, I had the ~~privilege~~ experience of being on such a project. When we were given the phase-I specs, all the senior tech people immediately said that there was no way to perform a sane daily backup and data-roll for the next day. The response was "We're not going to worry about backups and daily book-rolls until later". We all just cringed, made like good little HPCs and followed our orders to march onward.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-28

Yes == No

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-05-08

For decades, I worked in an industry where you were never allowed to say no to a user, no matter how ridiculous the request. You had to suck it up and figure out a way to deliver on insane requests, regardless of the technical debt they inflicted.

44 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-25

An Obvious Requirement

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2018-05-01

Requirements. That magical set of instructions that tell you specifically what you need to build and test. Users can't be bothered to write them, and even if they could, they have no idea how to tell you what they want. It doesn't help that many developers are incapable of following instructions since they rarely exist, and when they do, they usually aren't worth the coffee-stained napkin upon which they're scribbled.

That said, we try our best to build what we think our users need. We attempt to make it fairly straightforward to use what we build. The button marked Reports most likely leads to something to do with generating/reading/whatever-ing reports. Of course, sometimes a particular feature is buried several layers deep and requires multiple levels of ribbons, menus, sub-menus, dialogs, sub-dialogs and tabs before you find the checkbox you want. Since us developers as a group are, by nature, somewhat anal retentive, we try to keep related features grouped so that you can generally guess what path to try to find something. And we often supply a Help feature to tell you how to find it when you can't.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2018-06-10