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by HeyLaughingBoy
2930 days ago
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Probably all three. I used to be in the Medical Devices field. A couple years ago, I was told to add a feature to a massive VBA app hosted in Excel that we (S/W development) inherited from another department. It was hands down the worst code I have ever seen. Everything was a global variable. I flat out told my boss that it barely worked, didn't come close to meeting the weakest of our development standards, and since it was used to disposition product (determine whether or not it was acceptable to be used on Patients) it was an FDA audit nightmare waiting to happen. I added the features, but made some pretty unpleasant commit comments since I didn't want to have my fingerprints all over it. In all fairness, it was originally developed by a scientist with no SW dev training (I knew him well) for his own use, and just grew over the years as he was told to add more features to it. I have no idea how a company with that level of process strictness ever allowed this fiasco to happen. [rant over] I estimated the rewrite at 6-12 months. It was really not a very complex program and since we already had the Validation tests written and documented, we at least knew what tests its replacement would need to pass. The problem was all the stuff that we knew it was doing that wasn't in any of the tests. That would have been the majority of time spent to replace it. Since I left, I heard ownership of it was transferred to Corporate IT and they were making it into a web app to run on their intranet. Heaven help those guys. |
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At my last job, I developed automated processes. Some software companies sell tools to automate clicks and keypresses. The idea is then to reuse that Excel macro no one understands inside a VM on a server, and adding a friendly webservice on top of it. Users of the web services don't know an actual screen is running and and an Excel file is being clicked for them.