We Love Concurrent Engineering

Wow. Funny though really, I heard a story in the past about how hardware companies assign the worst members of the team to build the software drivers and such. Hardware it appears to them is the hard part and software is the easy part and here a company that enables the production of hardware has been hosed by bad software engineers.

Gotta love it.

Sadly, the solution that was being offered is actually the one that makes sense for the application architecture: Going by the description in the article, there's no central version-control server, just "PCB Designer EE" installs on individual developer machines.

The problem is that it's a local workgroup solution, not an "enterprise" scale one. Just because someone calls something "enterprise" doesn't make it so, much in the same way that wishing for a pony doesn't mean you'll get one.

Odds are, they would have been better off writing hooks, diff/merge processes, etc. for standard VCS tools and saying that they integrated with those. Of course, I'd like to find out what VC/SCM processses the app developers actually used. (If it's Visual Source Safe, then that's a major fail in believing that you have any enterprise VCS experience.)

It actually sounds like they had some talented coders behind this project. I bet everything worked fabulously when they tested it in their lab. Pity that they neglected to think about the real world.

The real wtf is that electrical engineers do not have their VCS.

They also use opaque binary formats for their, what we'd call, sources. Gross!