[AccessD] Summer Intern Software:(

Nancy,

As I said on another list the other day: "Access is a good development
tool and one of the best for rapid
prototyping of relational databases.  It main weakness is that M$ pushes
it as a tool for untrained users."


Charles Wortz 
Software Development Division 
Texas Education Agency 
1701 N. Congress Ave 
Austin, TX 78701-1494 
512-463-9493 
CWortz at tea.state.tx.us 
-----Original Message-----
From: Nancy Lytle [mailto:nancy.lytle at auatac.com] 
Sent: Thursday 2003 Aug 14 07:30
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Summer Intern Software:(

 f>>>>ine piece of summer intern engineering.<<<<

Boy, does that have me laughing and crying right now.
I have just been given a database that was developed by a summer intern
who had absolutely no experience with Access before he started this
project.  There is no documentation, except for some sheet laying out of
schedule of when milestones were to be met. 
And I was told it should be ready to give to the users within a week.
Well it has been a week now and I am discovering some major issues,
fields are named inconsistently across the database (trans_num in one
table, doc_num in another - they are supposed to be the same thing),
there 9 different queries, 9 reports with the only difference being the
year and category.., plus other duplicates of reports, queries and
tables, no relationships were set up, and although the database is for
financial analysis of money into and out of projects and tasks within
projects, I can find no code that actually updates the data in the
tables, just some code in the reports.  I am going crazy.
Have any of you (or most) run into this type of situation.  If so how to
you make the client realize that if they want a database that works
there will need to be some major revamping needed that will take some
time.
The client thinks it works okay, but that is because she is testing it
with static data and not testing it dynamically by doing data entry.
TIA,
Nancy