Ultrabase

After a few transfers across departments at IniTech, Lydia found herself as a senior developer on an internal web team. They built intranet applications which covered everything from home-grown HR tools to home-grown supply chain tools, to home-grown CMSes, to home-grown "we really should have purchased something but the approval process is so onerous and the budgeting is so constrained that it looks cheaper to carry an IT team despite actually being much more expensive".

A new feature request came in, and it seemed extremely easy. There was a stored procedure that was normally invoked by a scheduled job. The admin users in one of the applications wanted to be able to invoke it on demand. Now, Lydia might be "senior", but she was new to the team, so she popped over to Desmond's cube to see what he thought.

"Oh, sure, we can do that, but it'll take about a week."

"A week?" Lydia asked. "A week? To add a button that invokes a stored procedure. It doesn't even take any parameters or return any results you'd need to display."

"Well, roughly 40 hours of effort, yeah. I can't promise it'd be a calendar week."

"I guess, with testing, and approvals, I could see it taking that long," Lydia said.

"Oh, no, that's just development time," Desmond said. "You're new to the team, so it's time you learned about Ultrabase."

Wyatt was the team lead. Lydia had met him briefly during her onboarding with the team, but had mostly been interacting with the other developers on the team. Wyatt, as it turned out, was a Certified Super GeniusTM, and was so smart that he recognized that most of their applications were, functionally, quite the same. CRUD apps, mostly. So Wyatt had "automated" the process, with his Ultrabase solution.

First, there was a configuration database. Every table, every stored procedure, every view or query, needed to be entered into the configuration database. Now, Wyatt, Certified Super GeniusTM, knew that he couldn't define a simple schema which would cover all the possible cases, so he didn't. He defined a fiendishly complicated schema with opaque and inconsistent validity rules. Once you had entered the data for all of your database objects, hopefully correctly, you could then execute the Data program.

The Data program would read through the configuration database, and through the glories of string concatenation generate a C# solution containing the definitions of your data model objects. The Data program itself was very fault tolerant, so fault tolerant that if anything went wrong, it still just output C# code, just not syntactically correct C# code. If the C# code couldn't compile, you needed to go back to the configuration database and figure out what was wrong.

Eventually, once you had a theoretically working data model library, you pushed the solution to the build server. That would build and sign the library with a corporate key, and publish it to their official internal software repository. This could take days or weeks to snake its way through all the various approval steps.

Once you had the official release of the datamodel, you could fire up the Data Access Layer tool, which would then pull down the signed version in the repository, and using reflection and the config database, the Data Access Layer program would generate a DAL. Assuming everything worked, you would push that to the build server, and then wait for that to wind its way through the plumbing of approvals.

Then the Business Logic Layer. Then the "Core" layer. The "UI Adapter Layer". The "Front End" layer.

Each layer required the previous layer to be in the corporate repository before you could generate it. Each layer also needed to check the config database. It was trivial to make an error that wouldn't be discovered until you tried to generate the front end layer, and if that happened, you needed to go all the way back to the beginning.

"Wyatt is working on a 'config validation tool' which he says will avoid some of these errors," Desmond said. "So we've got that to look forward to. Anyway, that's our process. Glad to have you on the team!"

Lydia was significantly less glad to be on the team, now that Desmond had given her a clearer picture of how it actually worked.

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