Note: You may wish to read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this series to gain context.

As demonstrated in Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this series, the Plus application was a mess. It never really worked and when the desired functionality was simulated, it caused other issues. To be fair, the department that requested Plus in the first place was also a mess – its manager not only couldn’t manage the department’s 150 employees, but further had no understanding of what they did or what they were supposed to be doing (and those two things were definitely not the same). As a result, change requests for the Plus application had no order, logic, or sanity, and often contradicted other change requests made by the same department slightly earlier. It was a constant cycle of “Make this change” “Why did you change that? Change it back!” “Make this change”.

Culpability of the project requester aside, the Plus application was awfully, horribly coded. When eight new complex Swing forms are cached in memory every time the mouse is clicked, you know there are some performance optimization opportunities ripe for consumption. The code’s terribleness was truly stunning in the same way a 450-pound person is – you’re disgusted and feel sorry for their plight but oddly intrigued at the same time because you wonder how they can possibly perform even the most basic of daily tasks.

As noted in previous parts of this series, after being charged with managing communication about the Plus application’s bugs I could hold back any longer – I had to dive in and fix some of the problems. It was like coming home every day to a towering stack of food-encrusted dishes – eventually you just have to clean them up. I fixed a few of the smaller bugs in the codebase, tested the fixes, and checked the changes in to the Subversion repository.

Later that week I sat down to lunch with the rest of the IT squad. The boss was there as usual and had some interesting news. “I talked to Jim last night,” he led off (Jim and the boss worked at the same company for years – when the boss was hired at our company, he brought Jim with him from their old employer). “He was furious that you changed the Plus code.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked warily.
“He was extremely upset because you changed his code,” the boss said.
“…but I fixed it…”
“Yes, I know. But Jim and I talked for a long time tonight. He sees the changes you made as an intrusion. He acted very protective of his code.”
“…but I fixed it…”
“Jim said it was like defacing a masterpiece. He called Plus his opus.”
“His opus? That’s normally used to describe an accomplishment. He considers Plus his greatest achievement?! Those saps who hired him are in for a surprise!”

Ahh, they definitely should have paid me more to put up with this.