So after we finish our long-lasting project, myself, Derek and the Junior Developer were assigned to a small project. This involved adding a few fairly simple extra features. Derek was assigned to lead this small team.
I thought it would be interesting how Derek takes on the challenge, since in a smaller team, his incompetence would be more obvious. Sadly for the blog, he did pretty well. As a side note, since I wasn’t working with the main inspiration for Colin, and he is moving teams; there’s a lack of Colin ideas for the blog too. For whatever reason, external teams stopped sending me code to review too; so I have been a lot focused on my own work.
Anyway, as we neared completion for the final development work, we were relying on a third party to provide us with an API call. It was a simple true/false value we needed, and if it was true, we would display an icon next to the data items. As a temporary solution until we got the new API call, we chose a property which would roughly give us a 50/50 split of true/false values. That way we could check in our changes and see the icons next to a decent amount of data; a representation of the final product.
Anyway, by the time we got the new API call, Derek had booked a week off. That wasn’t a problem since all I needed to do was switch out everywhere we used the temporary property and use the correct one. Easy task. However, I changed all the places and one feature wasn’t working. Just so happens to be the only place where Derek didn’t use the agreed temporary solution, and chose a property that was always true, so always showed the icon.
In all the other places where we use it, once the data is there, it is never changed. However, this particular control, you can select a data item, then change it for a new one. Therefore the image should show/not show depending on your new selection. Of course, we couldn’t see that this feature didn’t work because all the items were always showing the icon.
Did he use the wrong property to intentionally cover the fact it didn’t work? Of course he did. I thought it would be easy to change, but the control had all kinds of dependencies and it wasn’t designed to refresh the image on a new selection. Took me the whole day to sort out. Massive twat.
Stranger Coding Tings 