When I was working for the State of Texas, they hired a contractor to do an application in VFP for them. He didn't know VFP - nor would he ask for help. His testing of his application (unit) brought the server to its knees and when he finally delivered the application to the customer, it had a report that took 45-50 HOURS to run. Someone would fire it off before they left on Friday, come in sometime Saturday to make sure it was still running (and restart it if it wasn't) and come in on Sunday to make sure it finished. If it was still running on Monday, it would lock up the system so that no one could use it until the report finally finished and someone closed out that instance of the application.

After about 3 months of not getting this report and other issues, the customer area finally turned me loose on it. Turns out, he was, essentially, doing a file scan on a multi-million row table with an SQL that called 3 UDF's in the where clause, and one of the UDF's in turn called two other UDF's. After about 40 hours of figuring out what the heck it was doing, 2 hours of talking to the customer to find out what it was supposed to do and 24 hours of programming/testing, I cut runtime down to about 5 minutes or so. I used his code as 'BAD' example when I would teach VFP report writing.

Eventually, I ended up re-writing most of the application. Apparently this guy's analysis abilities were on par with his VFP coding skill.


>One funny one was a company ran an end of month report and it took 8 hours. The full time programmer was indescribable! Let us say he was a back stabbing idiot, and be nice about it. He was paid overtime to run the report, and sat there for the entire 8 hours after everyone else went home. I was asked to speed up the report, and did so. The report took 5 minutes to run and the programmer was livid! “How dare you do that! I will not use your code”.
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>I then fully documented the code he had written and also created diagrams of module interaction, placing it in a binder with tabs. That did it! He had had the company over a barrel for several years, as he did not have any documentation, and no one wanted to work on his “baby”. For some reason the owner listened to everything this fine fellow said. Well, says I, it is time to find a working environment more compatible with human life, and I left.
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>Some day I will discuss Software Quality Assurance. Many programmers and companies have no clue what that is! :)