If you wouldn’t trust a carpenter who did know what was in his toolbox work on your house, why do you let developers who don’t know what tools they have work on your code?
When you convince a manager to purchase an expensive development tool you should be committed to learning what the tool is, and what it can do for you. Recently I’ve been looking at some code that a developer worked on long and hard. He attempted to make performance an important issue. The performance of this application is absolutely critical, as it is a vital step in processing data collected by field operations. The field personnel need to know in short order if their data is complete so they can demobilize. This becomes very important when you are in a line of work that has a $3,000 per day field cost. The developer who is no longer with the company convinced his manager that he needed IBM’s QuantifyPlus package. His manager saw a valid case for the purchase since there were known memory leaks in the problem, and the code base was in excess of 150,000 lines of code.
After getting this new tool, and sharpening it he set to work eliminating those pesky memory leaks. With the immediate fire extinguished a manager would have hoped that the developer took some time to figure out what other tools where added to his toolbox. Sadly, that developer did not do so. The true tragedy is that this expensive tool set included a performance analysis tool in addition to the memory analysis tool.
After having the code base in fresh hands for 18-months the software package is now capable of more robust processing operations, and runs in 1/2 the time that it used to. Further to that, the new developers armed with a toolbox that they know the contents of are striving to decrease the runtime even further.
Remember developers you are craftsmen, a craftsmen is nothing if they don’t know their tools. Sure, some of you may say that everything’s a nail for your hammer. But know what hammers you have, the 16lb sledge hammer is a poor fit for hanging that $5,000 piece of art in the hallway.
A future series of articles will discuss some of the steps the developers took to save so much processing time.
