Whats the longest amount of time you have spent on one project?

Question

1,2,5 years. Im a relative novice, so I've never spent more than about 6 months developing one project, however I work with some people who have spent 5 years plus developing just one app (I think it was banking).

How about you?

PS: this is not counting maintenance. think from the time the idea was conceived(or your boss told you better conceive one) and the time it went live.

Answer 1

About 30 years now and counting. A set of small programs I use in my daily work, and whose birth was in '79, or about then. They have been developed from something that started as part of my B.Sc. work, and from there upgraded with various options for various cases, as time went.

I don't know if this counts as maintenance though. Features have been added, but in the core is the same program from 30 years ago. Under development, you might say.

I still have a list of the things I need to implement, but haven't had the time these last few years.

Answer 2

It was almost 5 years that I am working on a web application development. It started with a single static page and gone to extension such that it can be called as Enterprise Application. Still I am working on the same and we deliver the features in Sprints. Almost I have worked on all the pages :)

Answer 3

In my previous job, we worked on a single "Software as a Service" package. I was there for 6 years and the "project" itself was basically the same. Of course, the code I was working on when I started looked quite a bit different to the code I was working on when I left...

In another job, I worked on software that was over 20 years old. It originally ran COBOL on mainframes and over time migrated from mainframes to Unix hosts to Windows servers. It still generated COBOL even on the Windows hosts (and largely unchanged from what it generated on the mainframes). We still (to this day) maintain the mainframe code because there are still customers who are using it (even for new work!)

Answer 4

5 years, on a SIP stack written in Delphi.

Answer 5

Well, my PhD took 10 years, 9 of them banging on the same system through multiple versions...does that count?

Answer 6

For destinct, individual projects (a single product version), the longest I believe was about 3 years from concept to release. Much of that time consisted of research.

For product lines (same product over multiple versions), I think my oldest is about 16 or 17 years from concept to today. Which is why I'm so big on 1) easy to maintain code, and 2) keeping to tried and true techniques, rather than the day's hottest technology.