We have this "amazing" little product using the latest development methodologies, components with all the bells and whistles.

I took over this product maybe 6 months ago and struggled with it from day one.

Even though it is supposedly is state of the art because of all its amazing structure, using dependency injections, inversion of control from the unity framework, hibernation and is domain driven in a .net mvvm xaml application to make it streamlined and modular.

I knew from the moment I saw the monolith that it was going to be an uphill struggle for me. A lot of little code-bits scattered all around in neatly organized paradigms.

Debugging is difficult, tracing the code is difficult, making new code is difficult, although some modifications is surprisinly easy but it doesn't out weight the problems I have with the code by a long shot.

When I took over the project I was told that the new management console was ready for delivery and all I had to do was compile it and drop it.

This was the beginning of a uphill struggle, our customer didn't agree at all that this was the functionality they had asked for so I had to do modifications to the program to their specifications.

Since the project pretty much has been overdue since I took over it it has always been important that we didn't add or change much to the original system. I could modify the existing bits.

fast forward until today where I finally completed all their comments and issues with the program but now I think that the users has opened their eyes (even though they saw this program many times) that they will be going backwards with this new system, that it will be much worse than the tool they got today (for a long time due to the fact that I'm the only resource on the project, project manager, tester, developer, integration specialist etc)

My problem is that I lost faith in this system quite early due to the nature of the program. Although I made many changes and improvements to the system I wholeheartedly sympathize with the poor users who are going to start using this system.

Its not nearly doing all the things it should do.

I had this conversation internally with my boss where I told him what I thought about it, that if I were the customer I wouldn't have spent money developing it.

So what do I do now?

The system in ready, on a staging system and nobody likes it, its too slow and boring and does maybe do 50% of what they need it to do.

Despite how much energy and working around the clock I've done to this project: I won't mind scrapping the system but we've spent much money (well my salaries) developing it and my company wants us to be proud of everything we do and advocate it.

How will I tackle the contractor when he asks for advice?

Surely I can tell him, this is what we agreed upon based on your use case scenarios, and be done with it?

How will I inform my boss about this progress? He knows what I feel about it but I always get the feeling he let my criticism pass him by as just hot air, gone tomorrow,.