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Ok, so late last week one of the stakeholders became adamant that there needed to be an above-the-fold section on the home page to hold static news items for the launch, items that wouldn't be pushed off the page as newer news articles were published. Had this been defiined a month or two ago I could have built something into the news workflow, but with only a few days left before code freeze I offered up a kludgy workaround, in which I could add three static links on the home page that would always point to the same three news articles, done by hand instead of being database or business logic driven. Everyone agreed that this was a good solution for launch, so I wrote the code and created the three news articles. The stakeholder who was pushing for this would be able to go through the normal workflow to set the correct text for the article, and she would need to email me with the actual headline and teaser text to place on the home page (hand-coded, remember, not data-driven).
Code Freeze was yesterday at 5pm.
This morning at 10:30, over 17 hours after the dev tree was locked down, I get an email from the stakeholder saying essentially "ok, here are two headlnes, point the third link to this other completely different non-news content, and this is only for Member logins -- I'll have another set of headlines for the other three logins a little later today. Oh, and the content and headlines will need to change at least weekly, preferably daily."
In other words, she described functionality that would take several days to develop, a completely new feature set, and one which would require breaking normal workflow on a daily basis and a recompile of the application on a daily basis.
Now normally I am a pretty easy going guy, and if someone asks for functionality I can generally deliver what they are asking for... but not a completely new feature set nearly a day after all development has ceased. I pushed back hard. Fortunately everybody in my chain of command agreed with me that this was ludicrous, and the project manager actually did a wonderful job of writing a very pleasant email t the stakeholder explaining what she was really getting, period, end of story. Three articles. Static. Rotating news items live in the news control where it has been defined for the past six months. I especially loved the part of the email where Maggie told her the CEO would help the stakeholder write the appropriate headlinse by tomorrow morning.
Score one for the good guys.
Code Freeze was yesterday at 5pm.
This morning at 10:30, over 17 hours after the dev tree was locked down, I get an email from the stakeholder saying essentially "ok, here are two headlnes, point the third link to this other completely different non-news content, and this is only for Member logins -- I'll have another set of headlines for the other three logins a little later today. Oh, and the content and headlines will need to change at least weekly, preferably daily."
In other words, she described functionality that would take several days to develop, a completely new feature set, and one which would require breaking normal workflow on a daily basis and a recompile of the application on a daily basis.
Now normally I am a pretty easy going guy, and if someone asks for functionality I can generally deliver what they are asking for... but not a completely new feature set nearly a day after all development has ceased. I pushed back hard. Fortunately everybody in my chain of command agreed with me that this was ludicrous, and the project manager actually did a wonderful job of writing a very pleasant email t the stakeholder explaining what she was really getting, period, end of story. Three articles. Static. Rotating news items live in the news control where it has been defined for the past six months. I especially loved the part of the email where Maggie told her the CEO would help the stakeholder write the appropriate headlinse by tomorrow morning.
Score one for the good guys.