Saturday, July 01, 2006

They Really Did

Pretty much any rational person would understand that the most valuable thing to a software development team is the Source Code they are writing.  They want it protected.  They keep it safe, they respect it.  After all, it is the fruit of their labor.

On my most recent project I'm working with a group of developers over in India who are partnered with my engineers here in America.  For efficiencies sake, we agreed to host the master copy of the source code in India to make it easier for those developers. Evidently, this is giving them way to much credit.

Several times we'd come back in the morning and the items we had worked on (we being anyone in the US) had been deleted.  Vanished, gone, poof.  At the time we wrote this off to just configuration problems or accidents.  It was only a few files here and there, and mostly there were back-ups.

This past week we came in and the WHOLE THING WAS GONE! Someone had DELETED our entire set of source code and associated items.  There was nothing!  Hundreds of man-hours vanished overnight.  No reasons, no oops.  Just gone.  And what is worse, they tried to hide it!  They didn't call and say "Umm, guys..."  We had to find out for ourselves!  What a nightmare.

Long story short, this whole off-shore development thing is turning into a way bigger hassle than it's worth.  Welcome to my personal hell...

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