Hi all,

I hope that I'm not the only one and I can get a answer from someone with more experience than me, so I can think cleaner and I don't get depressed with this developer's life.

I'm working as developer for a small company three years now. In that three years I'm working in the same project and sincerely, I think this project could be used as a CASE STUDY because it has all the situations that cannot happen in a project and that makes a project fails.

To begin with, and I believe you've already noticed, the project has 3 years already (develoment only) and is still unfinished, because in every meeting there is a "new priority" ,or a "new problem" to be solve or a "new feature" to be add. So, first problem is no target set. How can you know when something is finished if you don't know what you want? I understand Management, because they see an oportunity and try to get that, but I don't understand how can they not see (or hear us) that they'll lose all they already have and what they'll eventually get.

Second, there is no team group. My team consists of three people, a Senior Developer, a DBA and, finally, I for all the work (support, testing, new features, bug fixing, meeting, projet management of clients, etc) aka Junior Developer. The first (senior developer), does not perform any tests on his changes, so, most of the time, his changes give us problems (us = me, since I'm the one who will fix it). The second (DBA) is an uncompromising person and you can not talk to him, believe me, I tried! In his view, everything he does is fantastic... even if it is the most complicated to make it... And he does everything he wants, even if we need that only for 5 months later and would help some extra-hand to do the things we have to do for now. As you can see, there is very hard to work with no help...

Third, there is no testings. Every... I repeat, Every release of the project, the customers wants to kill us, because there is a lot of bugs. Management? They say that they want tests before the release. Us? We say the same. Time? No time. Management? There is always some time to open the application and click in some buttons. Us? Try to explain that it is not so simple. Management doesn't care... end of story. Actually, must of the bugs could be avoid with a rigorous work... Some people just want to do the show to the Management. "Did you ask for this? Cool, it's done. Bugs? The Do-all-the-work guy will solve." Unfortunally for me, sometimes the Do-all-the-work also has to finish it. And to makes this all better, I'm the person who will listen the complaints from the customers. Cool, huh?

I know, everyone makes mistakes. But there is mistakes and mistakes...

To complete, in the Management view, "the problem is the lack of an individual project management", because we cannot do all the stuff they ask, even if there is no PM for the project itself. And ask us to work overtime without any reward...

I do say all this stuff to the management and others members, but by telling this, the I'm the bad guy, the guy who is complain when everything is going well... but we need to work overtime... sigh

What can I do to make it works? Anyone has a situation like this, what did you do?

I hope you could understand my problem, my English is a little rusty.

Thanks.