How has the current economic downturn affected the way you/your team works ?
I am tending to do more enhancements, compared to brand new development a year or so ago.
This question came about during another pub conversation where we were discussing if it's good to work on supporting applications or working on new projects - which is more stable, for the foreseeable future, with companies cost cutting in all areas..
I mainly work on extending existing applications. I would say this is probably the safer of the two options also. More than likely people are already using the existing applications, and because of that you don't need to convince them it would be advantageous for them to start using it. From a business perspective, it is a lot easier to justify an expense than you already have than to try and add an additional one.
Number 3: rewriting existing apps (the guy who used to do my job suuuuccccckkkked).
Definitely seeing a downturn in large scale or new projects in general though, which is kind of the programming equivalent of saving not spending. Actually it's the literal equivalent of that, which is a problem for getting out of a recession.
Good question. I am at present working with project that has good customers and a decent revenue. So, the economic downturn did not affect much.
My suggestion is if there is a choice between choosing enhancing the existing projects or new projects, its better to go for the revenue generating existing projects. And investment in R&D projects may be reduced.
I believe "supporting" and bug-fixing on existing projects would not bring your much challenge and consequently experience. It can be a huge time waste for the career.
I am working on porting an existing business application to a new platform, which combines some of the aspects of work on an existing app, and some new stuff.
Its new because everything is going from Windows Forms to ASP.NET AJAX, and there are several changes involved in that process when it comes to the GUI and event based side of things, but its also partially work with existing stuff because the business rules are the same, the database is the same, although we have been gradually making improvements as needed to those.
On the other hand the company I work for supplies grocery stores which have been affected positively by more people eating at home, so despite being in Michigan, things are going well for the company, and we can afford to move this app onto the intranet.
The nice part about doing this is I get to learn all the new platform stuff, but we don't have to go out and get user input for some new set of use cases, plus we can work with the input we've received from the WinForms version.
I'm rewriting our existing applications. The fundamental design of the original applications wasn't flexible enough to handle our new business needs. Combined with questionable coding practices (a lack of separation of model, view and control and aging technologies with a lot of "NIH" syndrome) it was decided that rewriting the non-central portions of our applications was best.
Sadly, I'm not entirely sure I'm 100% qualified for this, but, I seem to be the most qualified of our team.
90% of my job is maintenance, or seems to be. But surprisingly, I've got about four projects of new development going or in the pipeline.