Items of poor design...

For the last six months or so, I have been in involved in a project where is the system has been growing organically. It has been growing like fungus. Fungus is a unique living organism. It does not have a head, legs, hands or a body. It just exists and it keeps evolving as long as there are enough nutrients and dampness. The system I have been working on is an IT fungus. The system has evolved over the last four years or so. Developers come and go but this system still exists. This system has no requirements documents, design documents, and no test plans. The software is poorly documented and I wonder how this system still exists. Well it does exist and it seems to be growing larger and larger. The system is composed of subsystems which have evidence that developers have tried to improve the system but they have miserably failed. The failed implementations were not cleaned and they tend to future the process this system's evolution. This system is a J2EE system and you will notice the following things in this system:

• 1500 to 7000 line JSP page which have scriplets embedded in javascript which inturn invokes JDBC calls
• Partially implemented hibernate framework. This is evident with *.hbm.xml files in the source code
• Numerous properties files which are now neatly packaged in a oracle database
• Spring Web Flow - The developer who implemented this portion did a great job.
• Prototype Ajax
• JSP pages with scriptlets and jstls
• Same piece of code in numerous web apps which have been customized for each web app
• Field level filtering in the database for each user (not role but user)
• User is authenticated between each web-app even though each web-app is part of the bigger system.
• Custom API integration for each COTS product.
• Outdated Stored Procedures in the database which were not used anymore.

A few weeks ago, I wanted to write junit unit-tests for some of the "cleaned up" classes and I failed miserably since all of the code is tightly coupled and it follows the onion architecture. In an onion architecture, you never know what you are going to get under each peel. The point of this blog entry is to remind every IT personnel that systems are not organic beings but they are rather simple business logic processors. In the SDLC, a good design, which has been reviewed and analyzed, clean implementation and robust test cases are the basic ingredients for a good system.

(PIC of a fungus called WitchButter)