MultiMedia Magic - Shelly Cashman "Learn By" Series

Shelly Cashman "Learn By" Series

CBT Software for both Web and CD-ROM Delivery

We were initially brought in to help rescue this project, which had already made two false starts with nothing published. A combination of management's inexperience with software development, plus a staff insufficiently trained in program architecture design and Lingo programming, were threatening to doom this third and final attempt to the same fate.

We suggested that process improvement experts be hired to work out solutions to the bottlenecks in production that were being caused by management. Then we looked for ways to ameliorate the architecture and programming deficiencies without throwing away the legacy product of a year (and hundreds of thousands of dollars) worth of work already invested.

There were two major problems with the code. The first, and most serious, was a lack of object-oriented encapsulation. The second was a host of errors in Director movie files that would intermittently throw script errors and were often difficult to debug.

In dealing with the encapsulation problem, we preserved the legacy work by only converting certain crucial functions to the new system. Then we built batch diagnostic and repair tools to automate the process of going through the thousands of Director movies to find and correct problems.

The client was very enthusiastic about the automation and programming expertise that we brought to the project. Over the next two iterations of this project, finally culminating in the TOM product, our contract that was supposed to be only 2 to 3 months long was ultimately extended to 18 months.