Re: Typical work day
- From: "Anon" <someone@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 20:38:39 +0100
"Phlip" <phlipcpp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:hGJ_e.1427$OH3.844@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> do you have a "helpdesk ticket" system to triage
>>> these requests?
>>
>> No, but we could do with such a system. I'll pass the suggestion on, but
>> to
>> be honest I think if one was developed nobody would bother using it.
>
> "Developed"? You do understand you should just download and install one,
> right?
lol yeah, but our place seems to be against spending money on buying
software and prefer to develop everything in house. I wouldn't be surprised
if a system was already in place long before I started and it just got
forgotten about. I've been asked in the past to develop a media player to
play different things depending on the time of day (for playing in our
walk-in shop), a picture resizer (for generating thumbnails of products for
the website), a HTML optimizer (to trim out whitespace, comments etc), a
mass email sending program and lots of others that could have been
downloaded free or very cheaply. In honesty I don't mind those sorts of
projects though (it's a nice break from working with databases) and most of
those were developed early on when I first started and had more time for
this sort of thing. Then again, the other day I was asked to develop an
add-in for Exchange to add disclaimers to all e-mails sent out from the
company (I haven't looked at this yet though).
I've looked around on the net and it looks like Bugzilla might not get on in
our Windows environment that well. I came across a program called OnTime
that I'll probably look into more over the weekend and also look around for
similar products. If I like what I see and the price tag isn't too high I'll
pass a recommendation onto my manager.
> Do y'all run the tests over and over again?
If tests have actually been written I make a habit of running them on every
compile. But I admit probably less than 5% of our code has any sort of test
functions (most of the old VB programs we inherited have had "On Error
Resume Next" at the top of every function which causes all errors to be
ignored, allowing the program to continue and totally screw up the
database - I've since removed many of these). For new code, it's a case of
getting the time to write routines that test a class extensively. I'm
concentrating testing on shared libaries that are used by multiple programs,
and trying to get as much code into these libraries as possible and away
from the executables. You wouldn't believe how many hundreds of times the
same piece of business logic is repeated, in many different programs. I'm
trying to get this logic into a single place while also writing tests for
it.
The problem of there being no shared libraries in the past and each program
having its own copy of the logic is compounded by the fact that we have many
different programs to do the same thing, all needing maintenance. Here's an
example: We have a program that processes most web orders. There is a
separate program that processes web orders where credit is being offered.
There's a third that deals with orders containing a product that is being
shipped from an alternate location as well as products being shipped from
us. There's a fourth that deals with orders consisting entirely of products
being shipped from this alternate location. There's a fifth that deals with
'credit' orders being shipped from this alternate location. They've all been
written from scratch in a totally different way with no shared code between
them and are not easy to combine. The whole thing needs re-doing really but
this is just one of several different areas (we also have separate labelling
software for each delivery option).
> I suspect the ticket systems support the ability to generate a knowledge
> base.
Maybe. I think we already have a knowledge base on the website and that it's
empty. I know the web guy developed a forum for internal use within the last
few months (another pointless waste of time IMHO, why not just use the NNTP
server that's part of IIS, or freeware forum software?) - this was requested
by the managing director as he wanted better monitoring of communication
than the network guy could set up for email.
> You guys need to get a helpdesk ticket system and _enforce_ it. Put a sign
> on the door to the IT room saying "did you write a ticket for that?"
Definitely, maybe a big no entry sign for the people who can't read as well
(many of the staff in the warehouse can't, and they walk in with every
little problem that is usually nothing to do with IT).
>> A lot of the problem with recording things is the time it actually takes
>> to
>> record and the fact that there's a "drop everything and do this right
>> now"
>> to every request from the managing director. When he makes a demand and
>> stands behind you saying "tick tock tick tock tick tock"
>
> I hope you are kidding. Managers must _not_ do that; it's a form of
> bullying, and it betrays the most blatant insecurities.
Afraid not. Fortunately this isn't a daily occurrance. This sort of thing is
however one of the main reasons that our previous IT manager left, and many
other staff in the company also. I've heard that, before my time, the entire
products table once got accidently deleted when he was doing this to
someone.
.
- References:
- Typical work day
- From: Anon
- Re: Typical work day
- From: Phlip
- Re: Typical work day
- From: Anon
- Re: Typical work day
- From: Phlip
- Typical work day
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