Customer wants some additional reporting.

System has been in place over 10 years.

It is written in a mixture of JCL, QuikJob,
COBOL, and 3rd party mainframe applications.

We don't track the data the customer wants
reported on.

So either EVERY piece of the system needs to
be modified, or a large portion need to be
rewritten.

I found the cleanest separation point, where
the reformats end and the 3rd part apps start,
so I'm trying to rewrite everything before that
point.

Which means I need to understand what was written
already.

Docs? What are those? This system was hacked
together, and then modified as per daily customer
phone calls. For 10 years.

QuikJob is horrible. Think mainframe AWK, but
then dumbed down to be assembler with default
file access taken care off for you.

The only flow constructs are "if" and "goto".
There is no "endif" or "else", so the standard
way of coding in it is to test for thing you
don't want, goto past the current bit of code.
So then the default case gets executed, which then
need to do a goto past the non-default case code.

Writing in it (or reading it) feels like coding
by skipping interleaving rocks on a lake.

If course, the QuikJob code is a blessing as compared
to the COBOL. 10,000 lines'o'crap. 10 years of special
case exception code. 10 years of a dozen different
mediocre or crappy programmers hacking at it. In our
company, the tape monkeys become print operators who become
computer "production" people, who become "programmers",
with no training or aptitude, they merely fall into place
and cut&paste the crap the previous person did. 10 years
of blind alleys, coded once, and then needed to be maintained
forever. This is because the data that can trigger these
special cases may show up anythime in the future (or NEVER),
and I have no know old data to run through it, so I'll have
no way of knowing if I got it right until some production
blows up.


Whine whine whine bitch bitch bitch.

While this is "reports", is also means altered workflow
on the shop floor, with additional barcode tracking, which
means I have a lot of people pissed off at me as I add
to their work load and increase accountability.

The reports have been promised.

They WILL get done.

On time, DAMMIT!!!

My boss thinks the 10,000 lines of COBOL will end up to be
500 lines of Perl, TOPS! He's hallucinating, of course, but
he's allowed. After all, he DOES have a brain tumor.

Doesn't matter how many lines it ends up being, what matters
is understanding the current code.

The project started off with a MUCH larger scope, but a lot more interview / gather specs.

As it progressed, I realized how insanely large a total rewrite would be, including the 3rd party app integration, so I scaled it down to the absolute bare minimum that satisfied the requirements. Then I found out the customer really has no idea what the daily processing does, other than having the ability to review the final result (printed pages, things from inventory gathered, packaged, and shipped).

So rather than interview / gather spec, it became read old code, reengineer.

Note: The total rewrite WILL happen anyway, since as a corp goal, we are trying to get off the mainframe and all the apps that run the tail-end of this process, but not as part of this project.

I'd volunteer for that if it was against the original author of the code.

I'll be meeting him next week for an hour or so.
Last time he looked at this code was about 4 years ago.
Fragile little old man.
He works 2 days a week.
He didn't want to talk to me about it.

Imagine hundreds of special cases like this:

\n090396* JJW SKIP RECORDS PER MEMO OF 08-21\n           IF IN-RECORD-TYPE = '40' AND\n              IN-ITEM-NAME = 'TRVGENNOPHPH' AND\n             (IN-MEMBER-NUMBER = '81313973  ' OR '81127887  ' OR\n                                 '81127817  ' OR '81127815  ' OR\n                                 '81127789  ' OR '81127888  ' OR\n                                 '81127462  ' OR '81127101  ' OR\n                                 '81127100  ' OR '81127017  ' OR\n                                 '81127016  ' OR '81127015  ' OR\n                                 '81126833  ' OR '80831411  ' OR\n                                 '80831410  ' OR '80831409  ' OR\n                                 '80831408  ' OR '80831407  ' OR\n                                 '79605765  ' OR '71823026  ' OR\n                                 '70313054  ' OR '69262548  ' OR\n                                 '78644991  ')\n                 ADD 1                 TO WS-SKIPA-COUNT\n                 GO TO 220-READ-NEXT.\n\n

Does that mean you've been coding stuff like that, just not quite as bad?

Beg removal. Edit history is here forever.