Are you building Alien Artifacts?

Jon Eaves has an interesting post about building alien artifacts.  In his post he talks about how consultants need to be cognizant of the developers that will ultimately have to maintain the solution they are delivering.  If they don't take into account the skills and experience of the maintenance staff they may very well build an alien artifact. 

One of the things that I worry about is a behavior which I shall call "building alien artifacts". This is where an external team (it may be external consultant, or in-house people, or even just senior people within the same department) help build a project in a manner that the incumbent team cannot fathom, maintain or update safely. Essentially an alien has dropped this highly useful, well built device into your lap, and if you press the wrong button, or combination of buttons, it's likely to explode or at the very least give you a nasty shock. To reinforce what I'm talking about here, the aliens have built a good system, not some piece of crap that can't be maintained, but the how and why is beyond the capabilities of the team who must take it over.

# re: Are you building Alien Artifacts?

Monday, May 17, 2004 11:43 PM by Darrell    
And if you build an artifact that your client can actually maintain, "senior developers" will come in and sneer at your lack of design patterns, your bad class organization, and excessive use of comments.

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