Fourth project was my first 11i project. The 3i projects took about 9 months to do. This one eventually took a year to do and is the worst project I've ever been on, although I did do a lot. It started out with me being put on a team to write the 11i Dynamic Reports. DR was a new product at the time, and more of an adjunct to the 11i call center reports. 3i had six static reports. 11i was going to have 60 static reports and a dozen dynamic reports. Two people doing dynamic reports, three on static reports (which are much easier to do since they're standard reports that Oracle has been doing for years), one project manager.

We spent months working out the requirements. Product Management wanted one thing, our then VP of Call Centers wanted something different, we had our own opinions of what could be done and not done. Us developers came up with two completely separate designs: one for PM and one for the VP, radically different designs that accomplished the two different sets of objectives. I did a lot of documentation.

One thing I did a bit was lead. Our Project Manager had a death in the family and had to go to China for a month. Meanwhile Dave Pick became our de facto Project Manager and he gave us real leadership. The real Project Manager was a bit wishy washy at times and he let us get pushed around by both sides. Pick tried to make sure that we were only working on one plan, not two. I got the chance to call some developer-only meetings and run them, so that we could do things without the pressure of having the higher ups around messing us up. I tended to be the one doing all the presentations to PM and our VP and having to defend team decisions. Granted I had the best overall view of the whole project.

It all came crashing down with yet another reorg. The whole project was moved to another group and another Vice President. Dynamic Reports stayed with Dave. My Dynamic Reports partner didn't like the project so he got reassigned to email. Dave took a while to get the rest of us out of there, eventually. Meanwhile focus was shifted to static reports since they were moved to another floor. Before we had two Product Managers, one for Dynamic Reports and one for Static Reports. The DR PM was reassigned to another group.

So after eight months or whatever, I'm by myself. No Project Manager, no partner, no Product Manager. I get discouraged and wander aimlessly around not really doing any work. Eventually Dave says I need to get something done so I spend a month working hard to meet a deadline. And I do. And it works somewhat though not to all standards. Luckily that wasn't the real deadline. So as more deadlines come and go, I'm not too sure what the freaking schedule for CRM is, so I'm writing stuff and hacking things together for the next deadline, then when that's not the final deadline I go back and fix things and rewrite the hacks then add new hacks to get more features in and get things stable by the next deadline.

So eventually I'm done, finally it'll at least work for 11i but it'll need to be rewritten for 12i because it's so hacked by then. I get moved to another project. Meanwhile Dynamic Reports is stuck in limbo and I think my version will be dropped and another team will try their hand at doing it right. I just did a demo of DR for my VP (he just wanted to see what I had gotten done) and he liked it, he liked it too much. Now he wants me to show it to the team doing the next DR and I don't really want to deal with this anymore.

Meanwhile my second project for 11i is actually several small things. I'm back on the core team, doing requester work. This is writing the glue code that talks to various switches and their middlewares. I'm working on two switches, one in maintenance mode and one that we need to get implemented by the end of the year. The first switch has three varieties, each going through different middlewares. Middleware software tries to standardize switch commands so that a developer doesn't have to code specifically for a switch. Middlewares eliminate me having to write low level communications protocols and crafting messages for each switch, but they can't shield all switch differences and each Middleware works a little differently with the same switch. So that's what I'm doing right now and it's great working with people again and not having to deal with GUIs and tech stacks and PL/SQL standards. Just Java (and some C++) and that's all I want to do at this time.