Unhandled Exceptions

Being responsible for the conversion of data from one version to another, I’ve gotten to learn a great deal about some of the intricacies of our software. I’ve also become completely frustrated with the entire process.

Why? Well, in the course of our development cycle, we are given tasks to complete (features to implement, bugs to fix, etc.). These tasks can range anywhere from the entire 60 working days of the cycle to a one day bug fix or feature addition. And unless you’re part of a team (meaning two developers) working on a feature, the scheduling of your tasks is entirely up to you. Unless it’s conversion.

Conversion is basically one of those things that falls in the “hurry up and wait” category of tasks. At the beginning of the development cycle, I made some minor changes so that conversion would run and create new versions of our files and/or databases, and conversion just worked because not many people made changes to the data structure. But I was nowhere near done.

Now, everyone’s making changes to the data structure. Mostly people are adding tables, which thanks to the conversion structure isn’t difficult at all. But it’s when people start moving fields or changing data that conversion gets to be a pain. Not because it’s hard, but because I’m very much at the mercy of others to get there stuff done. Sometimes, that doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to test, and it gets very frustrating.

I guess I just don’t like to be at the mercy of other peoples’ schedules.