Re^3: What is Enterprise Software?

[BrowserUk]

Likewise. A few years ago I spent a week working with some consultants from a "household brand name" computer systems supplier, helping them write what they call Adapters and Connectors for part of their middleare product range.

The Connectors are the bits of glue that interface to the external systems and hardware. The Adapters perform the translation between the format of the information gathered from or supplied to those external entities, and the internal middleware comms protocol.

You have never seen such a lash up in your life. Most of the connectors and adapters are written during the post-sales installation and deployment phase, by post-sales engineers (who are usually more saleperson/liason than programmers). They get hacked together at the customers site and tested on-the-fly. I was supposed to modify two pieces of code that "were written by the guys in XXX office for a similar job", and adapt them to the task at hand. You cannot beleive what hookey, inefficient, polling loop nightmares they were. Really quite unbelievably bad.

Luckily, I got moved on by cirumstances before I had to make a decision about whether to speak up or shut up.

[mpeppler]

Well - having sufficiently good credentials (at least with my direct bosses!) I definitely speak up, and I try to clean things up (a little) in the areas that concern me.

Michael

[BrowserUk]

I've never been one to keep stum if I could see a way to promote change without inciting greater problems, but this was very difficult politically. I was on loan though a complicated cross-contracting arrangement.

I had sufficient good standing with the client for them to request me, and enough with my employers for them to send me, on the basis of previous successful firefighting, but none whatsoever with the people I was working with. I was with them, the household name, at the customers site on the second day of my secondment to them.

So, a long standing good relationship between my employer and the client, and a budding new collaboration between the household name and my employer. So, who do you turn to?

As I said, cirumstances changed and I was never required to make the decision. I think I know what I would have done, but I am glad that I didn't have to do it.