Emily and Neo reported that all the RPS programmers had voiced several major concerns about the architecture and the development of RentEz.
"We're concerned about the changes we will have to make to the system for testing. It's already difficult to change the system without breaking it, as it's so delicate.
"This means that we're often slower to add new functionality than we (and everyone else) expect.
"We know that the architecture needs rethinking. There's lots of duplicate code, and we need to change the structure of some of the classes. In some places, there's lots of conditional code that could be eliminated by introducing several subclasses. But it's very risky to change it, as it's easy to break working code in the process.
"We've got a backlog of work to be done, including many reported bugs, so management will not support long delays while we improve the system.
"But turning it into a Web application is going to force a lot of changes, so we need to tackle it somehow.
"Some of the code was written by people who have since left, and we're not familiar with it. We're bothered about changing such code, as we often introduce bugs in the process. Some of it is very stable, whereas other parts probably need to be replaced entirely.
"Our users keep changing their minds about what they require, which can waste a lot of time.
"And sometimes we add functionality that ends up not being used. "
It's a pain having to work overtime to avoid running too much over our deadlines for a release, especially as the code tends to be buggier than usual.
"Morale is lower than it's ever been. We used to be proud of the system, but not any more."
