The Importance of Documentation...
Today I was asked about a utility I wrote nearly a year ago. Originally, I wrote the utility in different tools to aid a few coworkers as they required on Application & Domain Migration projects. Later, I merged the utilities into a single tool to make my management of the different tools easier, and of course to leverage reuse of some common things (mostly I did it as I can't keep track of more than a few things at a time.)
So, someone in our company in Central US required the functionality of the tool. They successfully found it on the internal Knowledge Management system (the KM environment sucks BTW and I was surprised anyone could find it.) They use the tool and crap, doesn't in their situation.
Reading through the tool Readme and seeing the configuration file supports some sort of logging, they enable it. Only problem is, the stuff I hobbled together initially wasn't logging anything in the functionality they were using. Bad choice on my part - and I'm always giving people crap about failing to do enough logging ( Mental note: fire me).
This gets back to the real problem - lack of enough documentation. Even the stuff you spend your own time on and put out for others to use, it pays you back if you take the time to document clearly and with enough scenarios, issues, etc. that one call can easily offset the amount of time you spend addressing the problem. That along with some logging would have prevented any issues.
Now, I officially don't have to support the tool, but I take serious pride in what I build and it really helps my ego to see things I work on get used, effectively, and makes other's lives easier. Hell, if we make a buck on it, then I feel like I earned something.
In the end, they were able to get it working and they must've missed something in the tool such as a parameter. I really don't know what the issue is as I have no friggin log file. However, they did say they would provide possible screen shots and feedback so I can fix/improve the tool - good customer service is promise stuff once the customer figures it out and never look back :)