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Closed 10 years ago.
I don't know UDK,but I'm interested is it possible create war shooter(like Call of Duty,Medal of honor etc.) with Udk in one year with two programmers and one 3D designer?I'm not say as good as Call of Duty or Medal but close to them.
As someone working in the games industry, I would say no. There is a good reason for multiple year development cycles with those teams. Call of Duty games take 2 years to develop even with large teams like Treyarch (around 250 employees).
It's not simply creating tons and tons of content, but making it all fit together, and all the dependencies between things going in. Like you can't start scripting up encounters until you have a level blocked out, and you can't start adding effects to weapons if the weapon isn't in game. You can't localize the text or dialog until it's finalized. A lot of that also depends on new tech from the engineering team. Etc etc etc.
That's all independent of what engine you choose to use.
Yes.
It is an extremely ambitious goal but if you are all working full time on this you could get something of middling quality in that time. It may be buggy and/or unoriginal but it could be done.
No chance of it being anywhere near the quality of the mentioned games though.
Umm of course you can do it, 3 ppl army to build a whole game, well... I will suggest you one thing, scrap cinematics, get rid off nonsense levels and cut to the cheese, thats whats most of the hard gamers look for, no fancy cinematics, straight to the action point.
In my opinion a good multiplayer game mode will do the trick as ,,, per now.. and wait fot the feedback, maybe if your game is good enough you can hire more staff, and work on the 1 player side. So cut to the cheese, and straight to the action, thats my opinion according to the amount of ppl involved in your game development. And many guys here will tell you,, ohh noo you cant get the same level of quality as COD, gee man of course you cant, thats obvious,,3 against 100's no chance, but what it is important is the idea, you have a good idea, put it on paper and then on your game. Dont go crazy and try to create the whole thing, theres no physical time for you 3 guys working 24/7 to finish this off in a year. So, start little with good visual texturing, then go from there. I hope you guys do well.
Nowadays that might be almost impossible. I work at Treyarch, and while I can't say much details, here are the basics:
You need QA - just this, and your quest is over. And this is only to test your game play, logic, whether a level can be completed, etc.
You need even more QA, for things you've never expected - certification (Xbox, PS3, Nintendo), localization (language, censorship, etc)
You need production team. Very motivated and goal oriented.
You need programmers, artists, animators, builders, scripters.
You put at least one person behind every profession, and you need at minimum 10 people. That would've been fine 15 years ago. Unfortunately not now.
People can still do it. There's been some game development of 9 people of sci-fi robots game using UDK (can't remember the name of the game) - but this means engine is provided, and the people have very good motivation, and probably are very good themselves.
Of course you can...the art assets won't be as good though
If you were to purchase your assets (3D models, open source engine, pre-made textures) then I suspect this could be all put together if you guys coded in only the fundamental parts of the game that make it yours.
The question is how much do you want to have commercialy bought versus homegrown and implemented
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Closed 11 years ago.
G'day,
I'm always trying to improve my performance as a developer and, after listening to this interesting podcast on the topic, I was wondering if people think it is worthwhile asking for feedback from colleagues.
I am thinking of obtaining feedback anonymously in the manner suggested in the podcast by using the Rypple site. And by asking one single, short question that directly addresses a specific aspect of my work or behaviour. For example, I'm looking at questions such as:
What can I do to improve the way in which the development team and the operational work together?,
How can I help you be more effective in your job interfacing with our major client?,
What parts of my technique could I improve based on the presentation I gave today?
etc.
Edit: I am not talking about general aspects, but specifically about how my performance as a developer can be improved. Communication and working with others is a large part of working with others in a company.
Edit: These additional questions are in response to a comment to my original question by JB King.
Further examples of possible questions that could provide useful feedback to help you improve as a developer are:
Am I becoming too focused or obsessive in my solution toolset?
What technology do you think I should learn to expand the team's capabilities?
What technology do you think I should focus on to improve the team's overall capabilities?
All of these directly address my personal progress as a developer.
cheers,
If you want to get honest feedback about what you are doing, you may want to find someone that observes what you do, and just ask their opinion, perhaps while having a beer. :)
But, it is important that you don't get defensive in any way, as you are asking for honesty.
And, you should consider making changes based on what they say, as that will help others to see that you are not only open to criticism, but willing to adapt, to become a better developer.
But, ultimately, you need to get an idea what type of programmer you want to be. Then it is useful if you have someone that you work with that exemplifies those qualities, then you can develop a relationship to see if they can help you become a better programmer.
For example, I knew an architect who would always pull a chair over and sit down when answering a question, so he was always on the level of the developer. That little action was so impressive to me, as it was a simple action, but it showed a willingness to bring himself to the level of others. That is how I want to be seen as I mentor others.
I think asking for anonymous feedback is bad, in part because it shows that there is a communication problem on the team, where people are not willing to be open with their feelings and opinions. The team lead should deal with that, as it could eventually be damaging to the team, if people keep their true opinions bottled up rather than expressing them, in order to help the team to be better.
I'd actually recommend not being anonymous when asking for criticism. One of your stated goals is to improve communication with colleagues; I think you might improve this better by actually talking with them instead of using a tool.
Being able to take criticism in person will show people you are confident and serious about improving. Face time is unfortunately underrated in our industry.
Yes, asking for feedback from colleagues is worthwhile. Often you don't know what you are doing great and where you could improve without getting at least a second opinion, if not a third, fourth, and so on.
Anonymity gives the benefit that those answering don't have to fear retaliation. Sometimes this works well and the result is honest feedback and sometimes people may enter stupid things trying to be funny. Que sera, sera.
I am not sure much good will come of it. I kinda agree with James on this one.
What might be better is to have some development workshops in your team. You could do it in such a way that each week 1 developer has the floor for an hour. Find a meeting room and a projector (if you have one) and let this developer present his / her discovery to the rest of the team.
At any point in time there are huge changes happening in the industry, so there should be a lot of areas to cover, for example - one week a certain developer could talk on up and coming changes in .net framework v4 (just an example), while another week yet another developer can talk about the benefits of shorter scrum iterations (again just an example).
The idea is the developer shouldn't be forced into presenting, and he/she should decide his or her own topic of interest.
This exercise might help strengthen communication in your team, and in this way the whole team is geared towards improving development skills.
This is the good idea, bad idea which I've seen is to take this idea too far, and expect developers to go away for weekends to so called coding dojos - yeah how fun (not).
Make sure these presentations are happening during normal paid business hours, or you'll have a riot.
"How can we do our jobs more effectively?" is a great question, and well worth asking!
But you should always discuss it openly. It's about as innocent a question as one can ask in the professional world, so if you tell people to discuss it anonymously, they'll think something funny is going on, even if that's not the case. And if you can't discuss such an innocent topic openly, your organization has serious problems.
Also, if you're going to ask questions like that, you need to pay attention to the answers, and either act on them or explain why you won't. People can handle, "Good point, but we're not going to do it that way, here's why." But it's pretty demoralizing to answer a question like that - especially if you made a lot of effort - and then feel like you've been ignored.
A good question that I've found to ask is: "Would you recommend this app to someone else?" and start the conversation there.
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I've been in the business of developing hardware and software for 19 years now. In the earlier days the projects and teams I worked on were smaller, much more effective and more fun.
The effect of the input of one single developer to the final product and to its success was evident to everybody. We had direct contact to and feedback from the customers. This was rewarding for our work and a very effective way to improve the product.
With the years the complexity of hard and software increases and more and more people were needed to get things done on time. The downside of the trend to bigger teams for me is that the contribution of a single developer to the project success gets smaller and smaller. And we lose the contact to real world of the users and customers because of growing QA departments more and more.
I always enjoyed my work and kept in touch with latest technologies like OOP, UML, .NET, and whatever. I already worked a few years as a team leader but I didn't like it very much because I missed developing and coding.
I'm just frustrated about the fact that my piece of the whole "thing" we're working on gets smaller and smaller and I lose the overview about it and the contact to the ground. Please don't understand me wrong, I don't want to cry for the good old days but for me the work on more and more specialized sub modules of a giant system simply gets more and more boring.
I'm wondering if I'm alone feeling like that and maybe if you have some advice how to bring the fun back to my work. And sorry, no, I'm not interested in working on an open source project in my free time. Nine hours a day in front of a computer screen are enough, life is more than coding...
I also require interaction with and feedback from the customer. However, a customer can be many things. As long as I'm satisfying someone (end user, team leader, big boss, etc.) then that's enough for me. The interaction itself is the key factor.
As for the feeling of pride and ownership from having a large impact on the system, again it's a matter of focus. You are still creating something, even if it's a smaller piece of the whole.
I long ago realized that I'm a small fish in a big pond. Learning to feel happy about my place in that pond was the only solution.
IOW, it's all relative!
I guess it all depends, there is a degree of camaraderie that comes with smaller teams and a lesser chance of ego's colliding. I have experienced both and they both have their upsides and downsides. To be honest, while working on a larger team I learned so much from other programmers, you think you know a lot, but someone always knows more.
It all depends on the team and the egos of the individuals.
When working on a team with ego problems, it doesn't matter how cool the technology is or how much interaction you get with the customers. One bad apple can drain all of the fun out of working on an otherwise cool project.
On the other hand, if the team has gelled, it matters very little if the technology is out-of-date, or the business problem is boring. Working on an back-office accounting system using VI and 10-year-old beta C++ compilers can still be invigorating when you feel like your peers are in the same fight and have your back. When you learn from others and are listened to when you have some new approach to try. When the developers control the build/test/deploy process so that it's sane and improves the lives (and sleep patterns) of the support team. When your peers (and you them) are always willing to help with an obscure language issue or work through a maddening bug. That what makes programming fun and interesting regardless of everything else.
You may want to consider changing companies back to a smaller company where you had a broader set of responsiblities, for one idea. Also, what are changes in the process that would help with the points you don't like?
I do have the question of what you mean by large here? Would a team of 50 people in a project be large? Or is it more like 1,000 to be large? On one level I'm asking for scale as there are teams beyond large if one wants to look at all the developers that work on Microsoft's big products like Office and Windows while at the other end of the spectrum are the one person development teams that do it all.
I'd second Kelly's answer that it depends on the team and egos for another big factor in things. What do you consider fun? Is it finding more efficient ways to solve problems that have poor solutions? Is it conquering a Millenium puzzle? Or is seeing someone smile while using your software what makes it fun? Lots of different possible answers and while I can make suggestions, how good or bad they are is totally for you to interpret.
I don't think you're alone in disliking how as a company matures the process can change as new people in various roles are added with increased bureaucracy and losing agility as it may take more signatures to get a change to be allowed or developers lose that touch to the customer of their product. There is a spectrum of various ways to produce software and some places may have less process in place and be focusing on "just make it work" while other places may want the process to be much more formal and organized with 1,001 policies for every little thing. At which end do you want to be working?
To answer the question as it's asked in the title: No!
I feel very similar and talked to many others who think the same. From my experience small teams are much more fun to work with and by that (and some other reasons) they're much more effective.
Thank you all for your interesting and valuable answers (and for correcting grammar and spelling :-)
You gave me some big points to think about:
The missing interaction with custumers (whatever "customer" means)
The interaction and feedback inside the developer team
What means fun for me. I think its more the smile in the face of the user than the use of cutting-edge technology.
How to deal with the sometimes overwhelming processes.
Last but not least to find my comfortable place in the big pond. It may be not the one where I'm staying at the moment...
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Closed 10 years ago.
After investigating a little bit scrum and kanban, I finally read this answer and decided to start using kanban, picking something from scrum (note that I'm working mostly by myself, and I do have read this question and its answers).
Now, my question is: which tool would be best to get started?
whiteboard and postit
agilezen.com
JIRA with greenhopper
a spreadsheet (possibly on Google Docs)
brightgreenprojects.com
Agilo
Target Process
something else (please specify)
Notes about each:
I would lean towards the whiteboard, but there are several drawbacks (e.g. cannot make automatic charts, time measurements, metrics, and sometimes I work from home - where I need it most - and it's not convenient to carry :-)
I don't want to remember another username/password (I promised to myself to signup only to OpenID-enabled services)
My employer has JIRA but my group doesn't use it - I might ask for an account (it shouldn't require another password) and maybe later involve the rest of the group. But I don't know if they are using greenhopper and if it's a big deal installing it.
I generally hate spreadsheets
maybe overkill?
I'd be happy to have a localhost instance, but it could be problematic to give access to the whole group (per network/firewalls) - not a deal-breaker but surely a concern
What I'd like to get from this?
being more productive
tracking how much time I spend in any given task, possibly discussing the issue with my supervisor
tracking what "blocks" me most often
immediately see where I am compared to my schedule
manage in a better way my long todo list (e.g. answering faster to the "what I should do next?" question)
Do you have any suggestion?
Note on the scrumish tag: read the Henrik Kniberg's PDF. He first introduced the definition of scrumish on page 9.
If I may, I think that you are on the wrong path. Anything else than 1. or 4. is overkill and pretty much useless for a non distributed team. So for a team of one person...
Seriously, if you can avoid using a web based application, just do it. First, unless you are already mastering Scrum/Kaban, you need to learn the process, not a tool. Don't let a tool dictate the process. Then most web based tools are just too much click intensive, less easy and fast to update, less transparent/visible than a spreadsheet and a physical board. They are really 2nd category options.
So, I'd go for a spreadsheet and a physical board combo. If you need some charts (I'm still wondering what kind of chart/metrics you want to generate and what value they provide), a spreadsheet is the ideal tool (but honestly, you don't need any tool to draw a burndown). If you need to work from home, take the spreadsheet (or use google docs) and post its with you. Let's be objective, the impediments you mentioned are actually not real.
Last thing, if you had chosen the simplest thing that can possibly work, you would already be doing Scrum, Scrumban or whatever. So, instead of looking for a tool, my advice would be to just start doing it.
agilezen.com seems like the ideal solution for you. I have used it in the past solo for myself and it is convenient. I would not let a prejudice against non-OpenID sites get in the way of making a good choice.
pick the tool you already have, and start using it; don't let the absence of the "perfect tool" become an excuse not to start
EDIT: pick the simplest thing that can possibly work. In your case that would be whiteboard and postit notes. These have almost no setup overhead and will provide a constant visual reminder of what you're supposed to be doing.
And I suggest that you get used to making decisions on your own, as you're going to have to be your own Scrum Master ;-)
In the interests of diversity ;-) www.kanbantool.com has just launched too. It's open beta and seems at first glance even more "lightweight" than agilezen.
Target process is good too
We've been using JIRA with Greenhopper for a few months, in an effort to go agile. I use it for both Scrum for development, as well as for my personal kanban. The software is pretty flexible, and I'm going to keep with it. The story/subtask management is really handy, and it's fairly easy to use. One thing I like is that you can add stories/cards quickly, and can customize the data. This allowed me to add definition of done fields, work order numbers, etc.
In short, we're happy with it.
Bright Green have just launched a free version of their tool. It looks good .. the free version is fully functional too: https://signup.brightgreenprojects.com/plan/Free
I've tried out another kanban product for personal use and am absolutely loving this one. Feels lightweight and simple but actually packs in a fair amount of functionality at the same time.
www.kanbanery.com (free for personal use)
A novel tool not mentioned before is getsmartQ (out of beta since Dec 2010)
Key characteristics: very intuitive, supports LWP, customizable forms, and task discussions
Pros
configurable workflow, mark overdue stories, mail notifications (e.g., for upcoming story deadlines), multiple story owners
Stories form completely customizable, per project workflow and story forms, different roles (people only creating stories)
very responsive GUI with partial updates
Apparently good support: I've asked a question and got a good answer within a few hours
Cons
no easy way to declare something as blocked or to distinguish type (feature/bug/..)
no API
no subtasks or story dependencies
In comparison to Agilezen it has a more sophisticated notification system, but apart from that still lacks important features (see cons above).
Note, getsmartQ is under active development and hence missing features mentioned above may have been implemented in the meantime.
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Closed 7 years ago.
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My organization has been experimenting with the introduction of more "Agile" methods. We've been trying the Scrum approach for a short while, and most of the team has, more or less, adapted to it. I like it as a whole, but I'm concerned about one potentially severe impact of the methodology: as teams are consistently focused on features and backlog items, and testers are more integrated with the overall development process, it seems like skill sets are becoming blurred, and people are sensing less respect for their individual abilities.
Some of our developers are excellent at server-side technologies and optimization of heavy-weight data provisioning. Others have invested a large amount of their careers learning GUI technologies and have developed a fundamental understanding of users and usability in an application. Neither skill set is better than the other, but they are certainly different.
Is this an inevitable result of the Scrum process? Since everyone on the team (as I understand it) contributes to satisfying the next feature/requirement, backlog item, or testing goal at hand, the underlying philosophy seems to be "anyone can do it." This is, in my experience, simply not true. Most engineers (developers, testers, etc.) have a particular skill set they have honed over the years, and the Scrum methodology, in my mind, tends to devalue those very abilities they were previously respected for.
Here's an example for clarification:
If a sudden change of technology occurs on the server-side data provisioning, and every item on the to-do list for the sprint is based on this new change, the GUI developers (who likely haven't had time to become acclimated with the new technology) might not be able to contribute to the sprint. At the very least, they will need to invest time to get ramped up, and then their code will be suspect because of their lack of experience.
I understand the need for rapid development to discourage "role silos" but doesn't this discount one fundamental reality: people develop skills in accordance to necessity, their interests, or their experiences. People seem to be less motivated when they perceive their position is one of "plug-ability" (e.g. we can "plug" anyone in to do this particular task). How does Scrum address this? If it doesn't, has anyone addressed this when adopting the Scrum methodology?
The short answer is an emphatic NO! Scrum does not blur or depreciate the skills required for specialization. Scrum does not promote generalization.
The long answer is that in Scrum, the most important thing is to get the work "Done". The team, as a team (as opposed to a collection of individual "stars") collaborate, as needed, in order to get the job done. Whatever it takes - however they want (Scrum is about self managing, self motivating teams, right?).
What this means is that a scrum team may be composed of several specialists, who primarily do what they specialized in (DBA, Graphic Design, even technical writers). The team, as a whole, should have all of the skills required to fulfill the requirements. This is not the same as saying that each team member has to have all of the skills aforementioned.
That being said, it is often desired - often by the members themselves - that members other than the specialists be at least adequate in skills different from their specialty. Another poster already mentioned Scott Ambler's "General Specialist". This helps the team when there's too much work of one kind, when the specialist is absent, and it helps the member when he really would like to gain experience outside his specialty.
Given that the team is self organizing, if for some reason a specialist finds himself in the middle of the sprint, without any work to do in his specialty, the best way to deal with it, is to simply ask the specialist what he wants to do. Let the team decide. The specialist can decide to help in his other areas of adequacy, do a POC for the next sprint, "shore-up" the defenses by fixing some long forgotten technical debt, or shine the shoes of the members who are working.
Yup. I don't know if this is the long answer. But it definitely was a long answer.
:-)
The point of Scrum is for the developers to self-organize. We use scrum where I am, and jobs get passively sorted by a person's focus. We don't do it on purpose with a chart and list, it just happens. We all know who's best at what, or what their main/secondary focuses are. If the 'main' person needs help, they get the person/people with a secondary focus in it to help. We do get plenty of tasks not necessarily in line with whatever our particular focus is, but you always know who to ask for help then.
For your example - I don't know that if you say had 3 server guys and 5 gui guys, that you'd expect to get all the work done in that sprint (if the server guys + some help from the others wasn't enough). The way the sprint is supposed to work is that from a prioritized list, the developers pick what they think they can get done in that 30-day timeframe. If that meant the GUI guys needed 2 days of server-side training in order to help, that's what it'd mean. Unless there were concurrent things also high up the list that they could do instead. The sprint tasks are not supposed to be dictated by management as a psuedo-deadline.
If you have a Safari account, there's an interesting mostly case-study book by one of the guy/s who invented scrum.
I've been working as a ScrumMaster for about 18 months and have worked with two different teams. I initially expected to experience the potential issues you raise but this has not been the case. What I generally observe is that the team evolves into a mixture of specialists and generalists as people find the appropriate role for themselves - one that they can enjoy and be successful at. This is self-organisation at work. I have never had a case where our specialists were sitting idle.
If this did occur, I would expect it to be raised as an issue in Sprint Retrospective and the team would discuss how to improve the situation. The most obvious (and brutal) conclusion would be to change the team composition.
I am not sure why skill set will get blurred. There is a fair amount of confusion in the agile world. Scrum is a project management process and not a software development process and should not be seen as one. The engineers have to follow their own methodologies like TDD or extreme programming to add their own part to being agile.
Nothing goes away in scrum.
PM's still document as they go
Architects still architect their components. The only thing is they just delay some major decisions to more responsible point in time.
Developers should still follow best practices such as SOLID principles to enable for refactoring in a consistent manner as features change.
I think Scott Ambler addresses this issue very thoroughly in http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/generalizingSpecialists.htm...
His concept of a Generalizing Specialist is exactly the thing Collective Ownership / Scrum Team calls for, and makes total sense to me.
Its hard to achieve in real life though ;-)
If you find for any reason ('sudden change of technology' or not) that the amount of work required for a system over a sprint is greater than the amount available then there's a problem with your scheduling.
One fix is that, as you suggest, you take programmers from other areas and throw them onto the mix. How well this works depends on the skills of that person and how different the problem domain is, but treating programmers as generic units that can be farmed out as needed is generally not a successful strategy for developing software.
This is still a scheduling problem though.
The best thing about Scrum is exactly the fact that skills do get a bit blurred! The point is to avoid silos at all costs by spreading specialist knowledge across the team and letting people work a bit outside their comfort zone.
Obviously this is not for everybody. Some developers are happy in their own narrow specialist field and such people are more of a hindrance in a Scrum process than an asset, whereas well-rounded and multi-talented people who are determined to get the job done, usually adapt very very well to it and are far more productive.
One of the key benefits of Scrum is to get the whole team actually involved and invested into the project instead of tackling their own special tasks and then riding off to the horizon. I'd claim that for most people, this is a far more rewarding way of working than the conveyor belt -approach of waterfall processes.
So I'd advise to boldly embrace the mixing of skills and having people come together to take down nasty problems instead of relying on specialist silos. The result of teams consisting of motivated people can be surprising.
Sounds like this would lead to more well-rounded developers, and also allow those who are experts in certain areas to continue to contribute their expertise.
I haven't used Scrum much myself (yet), but from your description, these types of teams would lead to a team/organization that is also more well-rounded as a whole - and shouldn't that be the goal of any team?
Handling sudden changes is part of Agile and this may mean that some people have to go off and learn new skills. Course this is more within the general Agile philosophy than anything Scrum-specific. There may be some extreme cases where the customer or business decides to change the world by bringing in something new and thus has to handle the subsequent pain of those people ramping up but if this is what they want and the developers are overruled, then there are only a couple of choices: (Take your lumps and try to handle the major changes) or (quit and get out of there).
While there can be some cases where someone that has specialized in something may be able to do things faster, this doesn't necessarily mean much if that is just one person on the team that is an expert and there is enough work in that area for 10 people for the whole sprint. Should those not an expert simply not do that work and let that one person attempt to get through as much as he or she can? I don't think so but there should be something to be said for those that aren't the best at something still trying to get done what they can get done.
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Closed 11 years ago.
In my work experience, most fresh out of school programmers are set right to creating reports for 6-12 months or so. While I see the benefit of doing something non-crucial, it seems to really discourage them.
So my question is, should organizations allow newbies to work with someone experienced right off the bat, obviously doing non-critical phases of a project, do get a real feel for what their career choice has in stock, or throw them on reports out of the gate?
Ah, there really is nothing like exploiting interns for remedial jobs...
Seriously though, you get back what you put in. Forcing them to do a thoughtless, thankless job for a long period of time is a quick way to build up a useless team member.
Perhaps they should be looking for a job at different companies? Maybe they shouldn't settle?
I was once a fresh-grad, and I have never been asked to work on a report. I had a programming check-in within the first 5 days of my job.
Maybe I am confused about the question. We are talking about folks who apply for programming positions and are sent to doing "reports" related job?!
I didn't start in "reports". I started on a conversion -- just get stuff to run on the new platform. Relatively safe, minor programming changes.
Then I did some new development for a while.
Then another conversion.
Then -- 2 years into my career -- no longer a complete n00b -- I wound up in "Reports". They wanted something like a dozen dumb-as-dirt accounting reports. Each was a "pull from the general ledger", "do some quick math" and "write a columnar report". [It was 1980, that's how stuff was done.]
I couldn't stand to do copy-and-paste programming. So I wrote a thing that extracted from the ledger into an array of values. It used a flexible notation for doing calculations on values in that array, then it wrote out the results of the calculations.
It could add, subtract, multiply and divide. You could use multiple operations on a series of "cells" to compute wonderfully complex things. To a limit.
I had invented the spreadsheet, built as a COBOL batch program. Seriously. That's what putting someone on reports can lead to. A single program that produced the dozen dumb-as-dirt financial reports. And a large number of additional reports, too.
Bonus. It was built in an Agile, incremental fashion. The first version did a half-dozen of the really easy reports. The next one did two or three more.
I don't think "reports" is a bad gig. What's bad is forcing people to copy and paste yet another dumb-as-dirt report program from a cookie-cutter template.
I believe it to be beneficial. It's what happened to me long ago and it provided me an opportunity to learn the database schema, the domain, and how the data is being used.
But, if they were hired as a Software Engineer they shouldn't be a report writer indefinitely. Programmer/Analyst however...
It's beneficial to the company in the short run, because then you can get useful work out of new graduates. It's harmful to everyone in the long run, because creating reports isn't really that hard, so the newbies don't learn much from doing it.
That being said, 6-12 months is a really long time to stick anybody on doing reports (unless they enjoy it, which most people don't). Maybe a shorter time period would be better training for a new employee.
I've worked in shops that threw a lot at the new hires where the results were mixed and I've worked at shops where they did pointless monkey-business exercises such as writing reports that nobody would read, attending 'process' meetings and open-ended tasks like "read a book about C++" or "learn something about this technology or that one. Both of these approaches were a waste of effort and time.
At my shop, if you are the new guy you aren't going to get left to your own devices to figure out X or to create busy work for yourself. Typically, we'll run you through our products so you are familiar with them as a user, then we'll talk through whatever task it is we need you to do, do the "I'm right over here, tell me if you need assistance" thing and then check up on them during the morning "what are you working on?" meeting. The goal at my shop is to get a developer up to speed as quickly as possible without skipping over the important stuff.
I think the key to successfully developing the new employee, particularly one who may be right out of school is to challenge them, provide them with interesting tasking that will make them not dread coming to work. If you get them interested in the work, you get an employee who becomes valuable. There are some tasks that just aren't interesting, and we all do them at my place. For me, I dread getting anywhere near MS Word to write formal documentation, but that comes with the territory sometimes. The 'new guy' needs to realize it won't always be code slinging or new development. Sometimes it is maintenance coding - much of the time it is. Sometimes it is 'turn the crank' type work. Sometimes it is report writing.
A good manager or senior developer will mentor the new hire. If a shop doesn't do that, I'd probably not want to work there myself.
They should be pair programming (or spectator programming) with different people from their department for a few weeks. Then they get to know all the people, the structure, the code and useful tips.
Reports are a wonderful introduction.
They tend to have very specific specifications, unlike many other projects. They're a good "stand alone" task. They also give the developer a good introduction to the domain model, which they must use to actually get the data out for the report.
Finally, they're (typically) reasonably simple with some reporting framework doing most of the heavy lifting for them. So they need to focus on learning the tools of the trade, deployment, and the data model.
They're a nice gradual introduction to the larger domain and application.
I've never been put on a non-important job as a safety function. Even when I didn't know exactly what I was doing I got put on important projects people wanted yesterday, and then paired with someone who had specific development he/she wanted to offload onto the new-hire.
It works pretty well that way.
If you put a college grad on report-writing duty for a long time, he's going to bail on you. Bad management and a waste of money...
I have two contrasting experiences with Crystal Reports in two different companies:
With my first employer (fresh out of University), our Crystal Reports expert was leaving, so I was asked to take over the role. No actual training was provided, so I had to learn everything on-the-job, with no support from either the Vendor or the Employer. Although my position description was as an IT Developer, I eventually spent 100% of my time working on Crystal Reports. It was an unproductive experience for me, and a waste of manpower and resources.
My current employer asked me to assist another Developer in creating and maintaining their Crystal Reports setup. Because they provided adequate training, and I was mentored in the role, I gained knowledge on multiple systems and databases. I even a little experience at administrating and maintaining SQL Server. And I also got the chance to interact with many different clients in the company, as many different sections of the company needed these reports.
So my answer to the original question is that it really depends on the organization, rather than the central concept. If your employer is intending to use it as a way of familiarizing new employees with multiple systems, then I think it's a great idea. If it's just a short-term way of foisting a thankless (and rotten) job on a hapless new employee, then I think it's a waste of manpower and resources.
The good thing about reports is that they are not updating information so there's no chance that any data will be lost.
Depending on what the tools are for reporting too. When I did reporting, I learned tons about SQL, and stored procedures. Of course that is probably not the norm for reporting.
It depends on the report, and it depends on the job. Many reports are anything but trivial, and excellent SQL skills are needed to create a performant and properly maintainable back-end. If your newbies are good with SQL, let them cut their teeth on the queries. It will be a good way for them to learn the schema of your database.
However, if "putting them on reports" is just a euphamism for them trying in vain for hours without direction or inspiration to format a table in Crystal reports 25 (or whatever the current version is), well, I think you probably already know my answer to that question...