When The Blind Leads The Blind....

I was tasked to check on an application for one ofour endusers. It's public knowledge that this so-called application is considered orphan since it has never been approved by the company, most of the functions does not really work, and lastly, the person who created it left with all the source codes. All the elements of disaster attached to it yet somehow, this application still end up being place in a semi-production environment and is used by a lot of folks.

Don't get me wrong. The application does work to a certain level. And the comfort level of the people using this application is really high. That's why we have to provide support to it even though there's no documentation nor do we have the ability to maintain it. The logic that's in place for this application was the same as it was when it was built 5 years ago. So much have change then and I think these endusers are just putting band-aids around it so they can still use this application.

A couple of weeks ago, a project was opened to make changes to the application requiring a different data source. This opened up a can of worms. I was able to get the required data in an extract file but loading it to this orphan application is another thing. It's so proprietary that I can't even create a test environment for it. The only way to test and validate the new data source is to load directly to a production environment.

After talking with the enduser on my concerns, we ended up agreeing that we will simulate a one day production update with the new data to authenticate its integrity. If it doesn't look right, we restore the last clean run from the night before. At least we have a plan in place. But it's really uncomfortable delaying the inevitable. One day, a new application will have to be created to replace this one. At least that's what I suggested the first time. For now, we have to work with what we have.

I say, if the blind leads the blind, get out of their way.