Hamasaki on Drafting programmers
From a WRP of May 1998... some thoughts on why drafting will not work.
John
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....
No way. ...for those who haven't been following c.s.y2k, there is a
thread running about drafting programmers into press-gangs to fix
federal systems. The real code-crankers are arguing that this is not
possible, the denial-heads and wishful-thinkers are suggesting that if
the programmers don't fix the systems as slave coders, they will be
tried in military courts. Sabotage would be detected by 'Configuration
Management' systems, whatever they are.
Please, no one who has ever worked on an Enterprise scale system could
ever imagine anything so looney.
And if Y2K is a crisis, the best way to make it worse and to
'sabotage' the remediation would be to enforce rigid configuration
management rules, and the saboteurs would be the ones who work within
the system, turning it against itself, ... I cannot release sub-module
RTP-3007 to the build disk even though it is a co-req to DRP 05 and a
negative pre-req to DRP 45 because I do not have the Heneral's
crypto-signature on the results of the post-unit-test report from the
QA team. The next QA team meeting is scheduled in 8 days.
So---reeeee. <you butt-head, draft me, will you. I designed the CM
system for a 200 person, 15 year software project.>
Yes, I have been funning with them but those of us who actually have
designed or used CM systems, have all encountered the situation where
a bug regresses and we spend days looking for the cause, cursing
ourselves, why did I do it that way, what was I thinking, what side
effect is working here.
I do not want to discuss this with 'Software Engineers' who have an
academic, ivory tower view, who have never worked on a real system, a
system with more than a couple million lines of code and a couple
hundred programmers. It doesn't work like they taught you in school.
Book learning doesn't count. Y2K is a game for seasoned vets only.
Too few days left now.
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