An Englishman, who was far off his course and confused about his next directions, asked a genial Irishman, cutting peat in the wilds of Connemara, how to get to Letterfrack. The Irishman labored over the directions, so intricate and roundabout were the roads, until, having done his best, he added this: “If it was meself that was going to Letterfrack, faith I wouldn’t start from here!"

As someone of Irish descent, I can't help thinking that the real lesson to be drawn from this joke (dating from the 1920's) is that recognising you're starting at the wrong point is a shrewd observation and a rare skill.

In honour of my wise forebears, I offer more prosaic observations about starting points as they relate to the dreaded Endur core-code upgrade.

If I were you, I wouldn't be generating piles of .csv and .xls files

You do all your product control & risk reporting by generating spreadsheets? Lots of them, you say? And now when you test your upgrade, you'll need to compare them all to prove they still work?

If I were you, I would have started from a proper reporting database.

If I were you, I wouldn't be regression testing the upgrade manually

You plan to test everything manually? And then when you find a core code bug and need to get a new version, you plan to do it all again? Manually?

If I were you, I would have invested in an automated regression suite some time ago.

If I were you, I wouldn't have assembled a large project team

What are you going to do when you find your first show-stopper bug? Are you going to pay those people to continue testing a version you're not going to use? Or are you going to pay them to sit around and wait for the core code fix to come?

If I were you, I would have started with a small team... focussing on the high risk areas... and be ready to re-assign them to something else if you need to wait for Openlink to fix a critical issue.

I could go on, but, genial Irishmen aside, don't you just hate smug comments like this?