Faster *crack whip* Faster
Jun 15 2008 10:53 PM Filed in: Personal
The DRM project I am working on at work has been
going on now for about a year. We should have a
usable product in production, but we found that after
all this time in development, the application is
quite unusable. I don’t think there’s any one thing
or person to blame for this, but if I can think of
anything we could have done differently, I’d point to
us spending too much time working on polishing the
application up to look all pretty for the customer,
while neglecting the actual day-to-day use.
We got a pretty good talking too, and management went into crisis mode. Here they are selling the application to all the users, everyone wants it, but if the user were to sit down with it they would find it was very slow. The architecture and design we chose for our application just wasn’t suited for the amount of data that it would handle. We were told we had 3 - 4 weeks to get it working. We tossed around a couple ideas, and finally came up with spreading the saving of data out over time, instead of trying to save it all at once. It was a huge change, we would basically be redesigning a large portion of the back-end; but as of Friday, 3 weeks into the crisis mode development, all was working well. We have a couple things to take care of this week and next, but overall, the big work is done.
Hopefully management learns a lesson from this, and we can concentrate on getting the core functionality of the application working, instead of worrying about the window themeing and animated cursors, and pretty icons.
We got a pretty good talking too, and management went into crisis mode. Here they are selling the application to all the users, everyone wants it, but if the user were to sit down with it they would find it was very slow. The architecture and design we chose for our application just wasn’t suited for the amount of data that it would handle. We were told we had 3 - 4 weeks to get it working. We tossed around a couple ideas, and finally came up with spreading the saving of data out over time, instead of trying to save it all at once. It was a huge change, we would basically be redesigning a large portion of the back-end; but as of Friday, 3 weeks into the crisis mode development, all was working well. We have a couple things to take care of this week and next, but overall, the big work is done.
Hopefully management learns a lesson from this, and we can concentrate on getting the core functionality of the application working, instead of worrying about the window themeing and animated cursors, and pretty icons.
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