Re: Named indicators (was DOW vs DOU)

[DAsmussen@xxxxxxx]

John and Charlie,

In a message dated 97-05-29 03:37:03 EDT, you write:

> John Carr wrote:
>  >
>  >Ladys and Gentlemen,  How many shops have you been in where when a new
>  >employee or a consultant comes in to work they are sat down and given
>  >a codified standards book, told to GROK it or understand it completely 
>  >before writing the first line of code?
>  >
>  In those rare instances when I actually see a written set of standards in
a
>  shop I feel like a "Stranger in a Stange Land".

Be sure to watch out for bricks!  In many cases, I've been asked to help
write the book, especially when it comes to AS/Set!

>  >OR is the new person just given a User Profile and told to "Start
Coding"?
Usually this, usually with *ALLOBJ authority -- BAD move.

>  >BTW Who's program is it?
Unless you're doing it for free, the code is the client's -- even if it was
just a handy utility that you wrote to speed your productivity that the
client didn't ask for.  Intellectual property laws are pretty clear on this
(these days, wasn't always so).

>  >Who will maintain it when you leave?

Who, indeed?  Standards help this, along with peer review of code before it
is approved to move to production.  Unfortunately, there are an AWFUL lot of
shops out there with a WOEFULLY underqualified staff for the peer review
process.  After all, if the applications were that darn good in the first
place, they wouldn't need consultants or contractors to improve them, would
they?

In my own case, I've been TRYING to get SOMEONE other than myself to learn
the programs that I've written over the last 19 months (that's the difference
between a consultant and a contractor BTW -- a consultant TRIES to put
himself out of a job).  The client has gotten better recently, but until now
we were so "under the gun" that all changes to those programs came back to me
because I knew the code and could make changes more quickly.

The problem with taking over my code?  Most of the staff knows only the
AS/Set CASE tool (in which most of our applications are written).  Very few
out of the large development staff know CL, native RPG, or DDS -- let alone
imbedded SQL.  In this instance it's not the client's fault, they were sold
AS/Set (and a bill of goods) on the premise that you didn't need to know
native code in order to use AS/Set.  The reality is quite different

>  >IOW, Who Owns The Code?

The client, the client, the client.  Unless you have a contract that
explicitly states that you can take it with you when you leave, everything
that you've done stays there.  Man, there is some stuff that I'd really LOVE
to have (and market).  Unfortunately, the clients that I wrote the "good
stuff" for were to savvy to allow the knowledge transfer...

JMHO,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-Mail:  DAsmussen@AOL.COM

"As for butter vs. margarine, I trust cows more than chemists." -- Joan
Gussow
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