I have been recently doing some contract database programing for a large financial institute. Part of a workflow system, not involved with a revenue stream, Thank God. Having my roots in the telcom and engineering world, software wise, I was expecting a more structured, formal process of software development. What I found was a facade of structure, and formal processes. While the environment had Alpha, Development, testing and Productions. Nothing, not a single data scripts, stored procedure, schema or database were under configuration control. To further make development difficult, there was NO (as in none, Nada, zilch) documentation as to the process flow, database schemas, application relationships. The entire series (couldn’t call it a system) of applications, and databases was being maintained by the developers in their heads.
This lead me to the belief that;
1) These developers were insane.
2) These developers were Genius programmers
(or Klingon programmers)
3) These developers were fearful of outsourcing
4) Did not have the time
(never enough time to do it right, always enough time to do it over.)
When I figure out which I’ll let you know.