The problem: a few months ago, our IS director quit and left us holding the bag on a monolithic, and broken, e-commerce system. Because of what we do and our niche industry contacts, we have many, many companies who are interested in signing on, but we can't do that until our code base works.

The Perl is completely undocumented, has many global variables stuffed into main:: and the database makes use of global temp tables that aren't going away and these keep killing the database. We want to extract the temp tables, but because of the extensive use of global variables and the lack of documentation, it's been difficult to find everywhere that these temp tables are used.

I have two other projects that I am overseeing and I don't have the time to work on this e-commerce package, so we're considering hiring a consultant (the other programmers we have also lack the time to work on this). What would be the best use of a consultant on this? We're trying to map out the system and get a handle on the data and logic flow, but we keep facing time pressures and have considered having the consultant do this.

Do any monks have experience working with consultants? I'm leery about hiring one just to figure out a way to remove the temp tables as there are so many other issues with the code, but this is the one thing that's killing us. I know what questions to ask programmers in interviews, but for someone who's going to be here short term, how do I evaluate them? How do I make the best use of his/her time? Is this gambling?

I might add that the entire point of fixing what we have is to stabilize it. A complete rewrite is being planned.

Cheers,
Ovid

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In reply to Best use of Perl Consultant? by Ovid

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