Build Battle Royale
Last week I experienced one of those "perfect storm" technical problems that can ruin any faith one has in project planning. I spent a solid week on something that I thought would take a couple hours... Background The setting for this drama is the (notoriously neglected) build and integration process. For those unfamiliar with this concept, it's an automated process that takes programming source code and turns it into an all-in-one file that can be installed on other computers. The build is commonly a convoluted series of scripts that are not well documented. Institutional knowledge about the build tends to dissipate over time as developers focus mostly on other activities. Phases Initial Change I had intended to convert some JSON files that describe steps in a workflow to their equivalent in C#. This was supposed to improve maintainability prior to my adding more workflows and was quite a trivial thing to do, in theory. Unfortunately the exercise took longer than expecte
