A sledge hammer to crack a nut?

We are about to start testing a major enhancement to the system.  Development will be delivering this enhancement in two drops, firstly the back end and a month later the client end.  This has meant that we have had to write a utility to create the packets that the client would have sent to the host in order to test it.  This Perl utility gets responses from the tester, formats the responses and saves them away to a file for processing on the host.

My “plan” was to then use QuickTest Pro to be able to create many of these files and files with many packets, using a spreadsheet to drive the QTP script.  I estimated that it would take about a week to get this working as I wanted it.  Unfortunately all my QTP resources were busy on other things and could not get to it.  Panic was starting to set in until I was in the shower this morning and had a “Eureka” moment – or more likely I realised I was being stupid!  I could do the self same thing with a small VB script in Excel.  When I got into work, I spent hour and a half putting the script together, testing it and hey presto everything I needed.

I know a lot of people state home grown tools are often the best, but I wonder how often we plan to use the tool we have without really thinking about the best way of doing it?  I saved my team a week’s work and got something for free – well, I am a Manager, so my time doesn’t count J.