The next release of the big, fancy, secret project I’m working on at work is due within two weeks. By “working on”, of course, I mean “Rewriting from scratch, in six weeks, what took the last guy 18 months; only now with object orientation and a much improved UI”. I completed two major segments of it today, leaving only a few. I estimate it at two weeks’ worth of work. But one of those two weeks is provisioned for Unit Testing and documentation. Oh noes!

The boss was impressed to hear of the progress J and I were making on the project. In fact, he was so impressed he decided to skip the testing segment of the development lifecycle and go directly to production at the end of next week. He dropped the bomb!

So now any side issues that would be found during test must be found and fixed this week, in addition to at least four more major milestones that remain undone.

So, yeah, I’ll be pulling extra hours and crunching, probably through Monday. Then I get to start on UT and documentation. As everyone knows, documentation is the most exciting part of the development lifecycle. It has Visio flowcharts, use cases, and of course a thorough explanation of how the entire product works. That way I’m easy to replace - Lovely.

So you might ask, what will we be doing after this release hits Production? In addition to updates based on user feedback, we’re scheduled to be tasked to yet another big, fancy, secret project. Only this new one is older, more broken, and an overall much bigger mess. I’m sure I can look forward to the same tight deadlines on that one too.