What? Disposed? YES DISPOSED…as of Friday, September 28th after lunch. How am I taking it? Pretty well for a pet project lasting over a year.
Bottom line, the root cause of this outcome is a mix of two things: 1) the users don’t really know what the application is or does, 2) the developers and plan teams (us) underestimated and kept the scope and $$$ growing and growing. How can something like this happen? No documentation. No subject matter expert. No clear requirements. Code is just a BBOM. So what good came out of this? Agile methodologies implemented. Awesome use of our tools (JIRA/Wiki/Subversion vs. Emails/Excel/ClearCase). Postmortem review and presentation.
We also found out the reason for all our headaches is because the application we’re rewriting doesn’t even fit the business today (and tomorrow). It’s a seven year old application with tons of bugs. The business is going back to the drawing board to find out what their users really want and need.
I’m now working on a messaging application that takes in feeds, stores it in our database and then creates downstream feeds for our subscribers. Looking at it for the first time today, its a beast!