As well as being a 3-day-a-week programmer for FinalBuilder, I also do the odd bit of consulting. One company I have been consulting to for a while now has a huge FinalBuilder project to build their software products. The build script was a bit out of date (!!!) and so I was asked to spend a few hours modifying it to make it easier to maintain and add support for new parts of their build process.
This was all fine, and I especially like working on real FB build scripts so that I can actually use the software I help write (and it's amazing what things I'd like to change - but maybe that's a topic for another blog entry...).
Anyway... what I came up against was, to me, a little strange. There is one employee (lets call him Fred) who seems to be just fine with things the way they are. For example, one step in the build process is to burn a master CD for distributing to customers; the build script copies all the relevant files to a directory on a particular machine which has a burner, then someone has to physically go to the machine, open up Nero, create a new project, add the files, name the CD, burn it, verify it, and wait for it to pop out. I get tired just typing it, but Fred prefers to do it this way instead of setting up a “Create ISO” action in FinalBuilder to build an ISO image on the build machine which anyone can then use to burn the master CD.
Of course, we could also do the burn on the build machine automatically - but one step at a time, eh? I am a little lost as to why people are like this - the investment of their time to automate the task will pay off after doing the task manually once or twice (not a bad ROI...). I suppose it's an education and trust thing, Fred does trust the rest of the build process in FB, so why not trust one extra step? And, before I told Fred about the CD burning and ISO creation capability he didn't know they existed - but now he does.... SO NO EXCUSES!
Anyway, I feel better I have it off my chest now, and I can get back to some more coding :)