Waveplus Blog

Notes & Domino is a fantastic environment for RAD (Rapid Application Development), you can quickly cobble together a form to input some data then construct some views to display it in interesting ways, in a few minutes you can build a simple prototype to prove if your concept will fly or needs much more effort than you thought. This is not a time for rigid version control as its easy to just copy the whole design into a sub folder each time you add something significant, you don't need to spend alot of time creating a version history as your unlikely to want to rollback, and if you do you can just go back to an older version and start again from there.

Once your application/ database is a production application though the stakes are so much higher, you can get away with lax version control but you tend to get hit hard by the consequences. The developers should never get near production application templates and you need some rigour and control over the design and who can change it. The reason for this is simple, if a developer(s) are making 'quick fixes' to applications where you don't have control over the code then it may cost you alot of time to resolve things when (not if!) a quick fix breaks something important. If you can't back out that change to a stable controlled template then where do you start?

Ok, It's broken - now what?
Step One: Baseline - Your not exactly sure why your fix broke the application and maybe it didn't, it was the quick fix three weeks ago but it's only just been noticed, or the users have only just got around to telling the IT Director or calling the Helpdesk. Your baseline is your dirt track back to the highway, it might have to be the broken production database but if your lucky a developer has a copy taken two months ago that hasn't been changed.

Step Two: Fix & Test - Thrash your baseline template and try to determine exactly what broke and what else might be wrong (Regression Testing), prioritise all the changes you need then make these changes in a fresh copy which will be the template for the next version. This then becomes our new baseline, the process is repeated as quickly and as many times as possible until were back on the highway.

Step Three: Don't do it again.