During the initial implementation of the companies risk system we were told to write programs and just make things work. The computers were from Sun Microsystems who also happen to be the creator of the programming language Java. We had the Java language and we also had a Unix server so we should have been ready to get to work. Yet software development usually requires a bit more than a simple editor (vi) and a Java compiler. This method of software development is hardly any different than using a simple editor to write a book.
Sure we could actually get things programmed but it wasn’t the most productive way to create programs. The good thing, or bad thing depending on your point of view, is that software developers are usually hired for their problem solving abilities. It didn’t take long for our group to quietly download some of the typical programmer tools from the Internet ( Eclipse, ant, vi, notepad++, winmerge, putty, cvs and winscp). This gave us the proper tools for developing and refactoring code in addition to managing the changes so nothing got lost. The official rules are don’t download anything from the Internet but our boss knew that we needed tools in order to produce.
I was speaking with someone from another group who was telling me about the group that develops on the internal TAP project which is an internal bug request tracking system. It seems that in addition to that group not having an enlightened manager they were also saddled with a rather odd technology. They were programming in language Delphi, there is nothing inherently wrong about using object oriented pascal to solve your problems but it turns out that this one didn’t appear on the list of company supported programming languages.
The set of tools that our group officially uses is not much better than a using flint and steel to start a fire but they were basically waiting for a lighting strike to start there fire. Because Delphi is not on the list of official technologies means that the client won’t officially purchase this Delphi development environment. Those developers simply spent their time taking notes and then trying to compile and test the changes on their laptop. This isn’t a very good solution as the database with the real world tests and bugs existed in the client’s network but it is forbidden to connect unapproved equipment to the network. I have no idea but I suspect that copying over the final executable is also breaking about 20 different company policies.
To this day, which is about four years later the client still refuses to purchase even a starter edition of the Delphi development environment. The cost of the starter edition is probably the cost of half of a single consultant day for these two developers – oh did I fail to mention that they were external consultants?