Southwest Fox - Day 2, Session 6

Whil Hentzen - So You've Inherited an Application. Now What?

Having recently inherited an application that has been in development for about two years, but not yet deployed, I had great interest in this session.Whil introduced the session by saying it would be a philosophy of how to take on someone else's app, not a recipe.

Whil stressed that (as with all projects) the most important aspect is communication: not just having conversations, but making sure all parties are really on the same page. One of the key elements in this conversation is to help them understand the potential difficulties. Whil elaborated that some of these might include the lack of test data, undocumented and inconsistent code, the lack of standards based code and stuff that just works by magic.

He also said that in that communication it is important to make sure that they customer is looking to buy what you're selling. Again, they may have different expectations and it is important to make sure you know what they are really looking for. (This tied into Steve Sawyer's comments about customers coming to you with a solution instead of the problem.)

Whil suggested something I'd never thought of: If you take their source code "as is" can you build and EXE that is the same size as the EXE in production. If not, there is a good chance that the source code they've provided is different than that which was used to generate the production EXE.

Whil recommended looking at Ted Roche's site for tools for analyzing applications. http://www.tedroche.com/

Whil also pointed out that VFP has several tools that will help when working with someone else's application such as the Documenting Wizard, Code References and DEBUGOUT.