When Something is So Slow it Appears to be Broken
I've been working with this software package for months now, and while I can't use the name for fear of lawsuit, I think I'll borrow a page from J.K.Rowling and call it The Software Package Which Must Not Be Named or maybe just You Know What for short. OK, it's silly, but here's another silly lesson to be learned from this million-dollar fiasco: Sometimes, if things are slow enough, they will be technically working, but the users will think them broken.
Case in point with You Know What was a certain instrument's trade ticket. There were supplemental data fields on the form, and they appeared not to populate after being programmatically set on the committal of the trade. I was testing this very thing this morning and after seeing it happen in front of my own eyes, I reached for my pencil to make notes of the fields I'd populated, and the ones that hadn't been correctly populated with the calculate values.
After a few seconds of writing the notes, I looked up to see the empty fields and amazingly, they had been filled. I'm convinced that this was what was happening all along. The way in which this system is wired up is to save to one database, replicate all changes to another and then reach from the replicant. If the changes went in programmatically, then the GUI might not have known to update them, and so they had to go through the replication chain and that was going to take several seconds. It might just be that the users/testers were impatient, and when they didn't see the data in these fields immediately after the saving, they assumed the fields weren't going to be populated and closed the window.
So... this morning I'm going to sit with the tester and make them wait to see if the fields don't appear. I figure that it's about a 30 sec wait, and if they show up for him like they did for me, then we know it's not a bug... it's a feature. Unfortunately, this is a nasty feature, but there's no helping that short of a significant reconfiguration of the system. Don't know if and when they might happen, but if it does, then this delay should lessen. But we'll have to see.
For now, You Know What seems to be OK. You just have to be patient. I wish I felt that described more of the users, but I don't.