TexasSwede

The other day I saw a posting in comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer, where the poster said that he have been defending Lotus Notes from people that dislike it and want to get rid of it.  I asked what problems the users had, and this is the response:

This is the only application we have in Notes - we do use notes mail -
but it is the application that is giving Notes a bad name.
It is the result of a extremely bad design and implementation of an
application 12 years ago in Notes 4.5.

The application - a customer order configurator - was created by
someone else in a branch of the
company which sold us off so the designer/programmer is no longer
available to us..

This has been compounded by massive changes over the last 6

years. I have added 2 new databases  (6 databases now) and possibly

140,000 lines of code to the application over the last 6 years. However
this has been hampered by the original bad design.

 This results in users getting annoyed rather frequently.

So basically, one badly written application, probably developed by someone that was not a programmer or did not understand Lotus Notes, then patched over 12 years is giving Notes a bad name... What can be done about things like this? There are some (old) best practices out there, but perhaps it would be a good idea to write some new ones.