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When you are creating a tool for a direct client that has no idea about development. She asks you to develop a tool to open a log file and format in a specific way inside Excel.

Ok, this is simple. In about 4 hours I can do that. After delivery and the client has tested, they answer: "Oh, it's working fine. You just forgot to include Y".

Of course Y were not in the initial scope. They supposed it was as it would makes sense to them, but at first they just asked a tool open a log. Ok, not a problem, I will implement it.

Weeks after implementation they answered it was not working with another specific file format (from a not industry default tool), but they have this client and my code should work with it too.

Ok, let's implement that. I had to change some functions and with some extra hours I could make it work. Once more, after delivery, they said the tool has to use a specific formatting for this file extension, that was not only different to the others, but I had to rewrite the entire code to make it work.

At least they paid me some extra hours...

Comments
  • 2
    Software Engineering to the rescue
  • 1
    why the hell should they be specific about the format

    one can open a file in a given format and hit save as to save in the format they require
  • 1
    Usually for some big , national wide client of a firm I used to work for, our standard contract was 'Will do whater you want even if you don't have any idea and so do us, at the price you want but in a time we want. To be fair you can raise an emergency situation and force us to resolve it in the time you think it's right. You can raise many emergency situation you want even multiple time a day.'
  • 1
    @dhanvi not just a conversion. Different tools that save some info I a totally different way and file format. XML vs CSV with different structure, data etc.

    Both are logs with similar data, but each one with your own rulersets. The first one was simple as open each value to a different Excel column and make some calculations and apply font, colors etc.

    The latter one was necessary to adapt all the content, study the rulesets (there is no documentation and appears to have differences of each version of the same tool), rewrite all the calculations, font, Excel columns to fill with other infos, change the Excel formulas they need to each log etc.
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