Developer's Checklist: Taking over a project
- Joel Lipman
- Web-Development
- Hits: 9091
So I'm starting to get the impression that I no longer tender for brand new projects competing with time and cost in order to win the bids. Recently, more and more people have been asking if I can take over a project that has been abandoned by its developer.
I've started writing this article because I find myself forgetting to ask something that could have saved an infinite number of man-hours (I exaggerate a little); but seriously, I needed a checklist that works for me.
Most Difficult?
My hardest project was (still is) one created by a PhD student who graduated and left the institution. It was a custom-built site written from scratch, and it's purpose was to manage Staff and Students within the Additional Learning Needs group. These are staff who take lecture notes for people of all disabilities and assist the students for the duration of their course. It had to allow for synchronizing with the official student record system and timetabling system (done via file upload). It included it's own timesheet / session management / invoicing system.
The website was held on a virtual host running PHP and MySQL. There was no documentation, logs, notes, and any code comments were in Hungarian (later found out it was slang or a dialect not understood by most Hungarians). Fellow students and system administrators could not accurately describe what the system was for and what it does. The developer had created the system to only last during one academic year, and the system itself only just about understood academic years (required tweaking twice a year). Then there were the error logs... some 20000 errors per use of a feature over 4 seconds. Do some developers never check the errors log?
By the time, I started maintaining the project, a revamp had been agreed with another web team. This has been delayed somewhat and still after 2 years there is no new site (blamed on the customer for not knowing what their application did in the first place... tut tut. How long have you been a developer? And this is new?).