Good luck with your rollout. I was in a similar situation once. Our whole CSR department depended on this one app. (And we had quite a suite of in-house stuff used by the various departments.) It had originally been written in Clipper, we converted it to Delphi. (Still my favorite language) We didn't have a dry run although we had shown enough of the higher staff in that department and the way I designed it you couldn't make any mistakes. And the app was solid. So they went from a DOS app overnight to a Windows app. And it went smooth as silk. I also refused to let my team (I was the lead software architect at the company amongst other managerial positions but I rolled my sleeves up and designed everything and built the framework. Then my team built the pieces) anyway, sorry, got carried away there. I refused to let my staff work overtime. If I needed more people I hired them. Caused some grief between me and other department heads but that's how it was. Work done after 5pm was garbage anyway and more time was spent fixing it. Some people just don't get it.
My main rule of thumb was there should be nothing that a user can do that would result in an error, unexpected behavior or ruin the integrity of our databases. No key presses no matter what (besides alt-f4) should ever be able to do anything that is results in anything but expected behavior. And even alt-f4 was anticipated. All databases were closed cleanly and the program exited gracefully.
So again, good luck!!!!
Now back to that weather. One word. Brrrrrr.
Delphi, huh? That's a scripting language, right? I learned about it a bit in school but don't remember much about it. I've learned a bit of Ruby which I LOVE (the Rails framework is pretty good too - mostly for the community support if nothing else). We write in C#, HTML5, CSS3 and use Entityframework4, ASP.NET MVC4 with some Razor, Jquery, KnockoutJS, JqueryUI, and a bunch of other stuff thats not coming to mind
I have a nack for architecture, but we don't have an architectural lead. The company is a great company to work for 99% of the time. The dev team, not so much. They don't segregate developers, you are a developer.. So everyone works on everything. Good in concept as you are already "cross trained" but it gets ugly quick when you don't have a set of well defined best practices - I've tried to push people in the right direction but there is only so much I can do as an underling.
It would be much cleaner to work in one language with one framework but anyone that appreciates the beauty of a good solid architecture can tell you dealing with the web is a huge bottle neck in design. DRY Code? not with a heavy platform that users expect to be lighting fast - you have code on the backend to do the actual processing and you have javascript for the front end to 'fake' the processing so they can see the results "as they happen". Posting back to the server to do several calculations just isn't going to happen - especially when the developers don't support that line of thinking and you have multiple processing components crammed into a single object (ewww..).
We are more of a fly by the seat of your pants
shop. They call it "Agile" but its not... Agile you have a plan. You do a lot of upfront architecture work and you stick to it. If an iteration comes back that doesn't mesh with the architecture you adjust the architecture, you don't just
throw it out or ignore it and start patching willy nilly. Thats my opinion anyway, most of the other guys (there are 5 of us) don't seem to be of that opinion or don't think at all and just code (ugh..).
So we end up with lots of bugs as we don't have any automated testing in place.
This is actually the second release to the new system - we are replacing a legacy app that didn't fit the companies business model. Last april we did the initial release, on a tuesday then we worked LONG shifts to fix all the bugs from the rushed push (we planed to have the users run through the code to weed out anything that didn't look right, but they said "neh, we've tested the components individually, it will get figured out in live" ... I rolled my eyes then as I roll my eyes now..
I could go on, but </rant> this site is about
vaping, so inhale exhale let'n' it go
tl;dr:
