I’ve been extremelly busy at work since my boss resigned about 3 weeks ago.  To worsen the situation, some other developer has also left, leaving me as the new maintainer for his “legacy” application.  The so called “program” is entirely written in Java, acting as a “wrapper” for Oracle and Sybase procedural code, written in PL/SQL and T-SQL respectively.

It turns out that every quarter this application gets modified to satisfy the new “business rules” that are “engineered” by the major stakeholders in order to satisfy their needs.  After several iterations and undocumented modifications done to the program, the beast has turn into a major, stinking “onion”, full of layer upon layer of patches.

Well, it is that time of the year, and I am now in charge of supporting this onion!  There are so many sections of useless and non-sense code that I could probably write a book on how not to write code!  Today I came across this beautiful “pearl” and just could not resist sharing it with the world!  ;)  In case you fail to appreciate the “beauty” of it, just keep moving along…  Names have been removed to protect the victims… no, not the author of this monstrosity, but the users, who would probably throw themselves out their office’s window if they learned about some of this stuff!  :) Line 34:

update costactual_cip set phase = ‘FandE' where phase in ('Cm', 'Scope', 'Design', 'Construction', 'Contingency') and llwnumber in (select llwnumber from projectcip where llw_type = 'RESOAP');

Line 570:

update costactual_cip set phase = ‘Construction’ where phase in (‘Scope’, ‘Design’, ‘Cm’, ‘Contingency’, ‘FandE’, ‘Unspecified’) and llwnumber in (select llwnumber from projectcip where llw_type = ‘RESOAP');