Hi,

I have joined a very small where one main developer has been buiding the web app (.NET 4.0) during ~6 months. The project should be delivered within next 2 months.

After first look at the code I can say that I would never allow it to go to production (things like catch { }, not tests at all with WebForms etc).

So the code quality is incredibly low.

My task is to improve that and still deliver the solution. So I plan to start with unit testing and MVC2 reimplementing most of the functionality (though using some of the existing code).

I estimate that I will need about 6 weeks to catch up with the current progress and be on te same functionality level as the application will be in 6 months.

The problem is that the main developer who has been working on the project does not seem to be very 'professional' and skillful (he seems to be really starting in IT and many basic things are unknown to him). It will take significant amount of time and effort to educate him how to do the proper testing, development and apply some patterns.

I am ready to take responsibility for the reimplemnting the application but at the same time I don't want the main developer to be on idle but as he won't be able to significantly contribute to the better-world project at this stage I am not sure what would the best way to keep productivity high for both of us.

Currently I think following solution is good enough: He proceeds doing what he does until I will catch up with him and then start working on a new project together.

The problem is that of course this approach is not very productive as one developer will do better-world project while the other will proceed with what he did, effectively doing similar tasks.

Can you suggest how we could better organise the work together in order to be most efficient for the overall project?

Thanks,
Dmitriy.