A Very Brief Overview
The salient points:
You work for a furniture company
You get a promotion!
You are now responsible for the warehouse inventory system...
No one has touched it for a while
It was written in 2003
It’s a 3-tier architecture
It basically works, although people moan about it.
What do you do?
Why this example?
Most organizations are not primarily focused on technology! One of the reasons I have picked a furniture company is that any IT systems they have will support the main business rather than being the revenue driver. This is true for most IT systems in most organizations – web companies selling online services are not representative.
You have found yourself responsible for this system and discovered that no one has developed (or performed maintenance) programming on this system for a while. However, the system is used and performs an important and core (supporting) function within the business – no one gets their furniture if the warehouse is not operating correctly.
How should you respond to the situation you find yourself in and what problems are you likely to face? What are the strategies you should employ and how should you execute them?
It’s very difficult to get a good impression of what this system does, who uses it, and how they use it from the description above (or any text-only description). Hopefully, the diagrams and sketching techniques used in the planning chapters demonstrated how useful they can be.