How To Assign A Bug

I was asked by Simon to check source control to see if there was an obvious cause of a problem reported by a customer. I looked through the code and couldn’t find anything that stood out.

I heard Simon talk on the phone and it sounded like it was an important issue. I asked him if this was high priority and he said it was.

So I did a bit more digging, then Colin came over. Simon had also asked Colin to look into it, and Colin said to me “don’t worry about it, I’ll look into it.” So I went back to my normal project work.

An hour or so later, I heard a tester talk about the issue. I was interested in how the situation was progressing, so I went over to ask them about it. He said he had just started looking into it, but wondered if I had recreated it yet. I tell him; “I’m not looking into it, Colin is”. Simon then says “you have to look into it, Colin’s manager won’t let him work on it”.

“What the hell? Why wasn’t I told?” I then asked if there was a work item with information about the bug. “No” replies Simon.

Back in my day, we were told that we couldn’t work on anything without a bug being logged. It makes sense, all information goes in the item, and then if you are off sick, another person can easily pick it up.

If there’s no bug report, how do I know what the problem is, or perceived to be? Anyway, I ask the tester, and he shows me a Slack conversation from Simon. If I was always supposed to be looking at this issue, why weren’t I added to this Slack conversation?

I begin setting up the data to try and recreate the issue, when Colin comes over. Even though he isn’t working on it, he wanted to give me some advice. He starts talking about a recent project that was completed. I ask:

“What are you on about? Is this relevant to this issue?”.

“Yes, it’s in the email thread”.

“What email thread?!”

So even though it was decided that Colin couldn’t look at this issue, he was involved in an email thread. The tester was involved in a Slack thread. I’m not involved in either of them.

Again, how can I be expected to recreate an issue, when I don’t know any of the details? Also, it is pretty urgent. There’s a call tomorrow with several people from other departments; support staff, important managers etc. I’m supposed to explain my theories of how this problem was introduced.

Absolute farcical.

Later on, I’m at a different manager’s desk, and he has an email open. It’s an email thread between a few managers discussing if Colin can look at the issue or not. It’s not just Colin’s line manager, but other important managers within the department.

So much time wasted trying to decide which person should do the work, meanwhile there’s no process that is followed to actually assign the work properly. It’s thrown between verbal, email and instant messaging.

How difficult is it to log the issue properly, then find a developer that is available to look into it? It’s not like we’ve never seen a bug before. What happened to the “tried and tested” process?

Mini Musing #4: Amnesia

Colin sits down next to Senior Developer Tim.

Colin: “Can I speak to you about the 2 things I was going to ask you yesterday?”
Tim: “Yeah sure, what’s up?”
Colin: “Can you remember what the questions were?”
Tim: “No”
Colin: “I’ll come back when I remember what they were”.

Brilliant. Sometimes it’s like a comedy show.

Window-dressing The Codebase

We have a report analysing our code that does the usual static analysis checks like Code Coverage, “Code Smells” etc.

One team boasted how their report was 100% code coverage and 0 Code Smells; a perfect score.

I thought it was strange because over the previous 3 weeks, many people had pointed out the many bugs their project had. If they do have 100% code coverage, then they aren’t testing the right things. Zero code smells seems suspicious too.

I had a little peek at their repository to spot any suspicious activity. One of the recent bugs stated “we have run out of switch statements”. Obviously, to us software developers – that is a very funny statement to make. What he meant was, they have a huge switch with 30 conditions and the report flags up switch statements that exceed 30 conditions. This is a “Code Smell” because it implies its a bad design.

You could address this warning by:

rewrite a large part of it to implement a better design
do nothing. The warning still flags it in the report.
suppress the warning so the report doesn’t show it.

The developer decided to make a code change, but didn’t bother with a better design. His new switch had 30 statements, but the “default case” then called another method which had another several conditions in it. It gets rid of the warning, but it makes the code more harder to read; so he has made it worse. Suppressing the warning keeps the code readable, but you will still be perceived to be fiddling the report.

Looking at other recent check-ins, the team had “temporarily” suppressed warnings and then logged Bugs to address them later. This is definitely fiddling the report. It makes the report look good, but increased their backlog of work, and wasted time. They could have done meaningful work and let the report do its job with reporting accurate figures.

Then they are highlighting their teams “success” to the managers. The managers don’t look much further than a report, so they are happy.

Just follow the instructions

There’s a team who chose to set-up a generated report every time a code build was triggered. This report will show the usual static analysis checks like Code Coverage, “Code Smells”, bugs etc. It was encouraged that other teams should set this up too; so we were told to contact Rory who was leading this initiative.

I took responsibility for setting this up for my team, so I contacted Rory who sent me a link and said “just follow the instructions”.

I look at the instructions and they seemed to be for setting up a new instance of a Report server, rather than making your build process utilise the existing Report server. Common sense told me he had sent me the wrong link. I asked him again.

He reiterates: “It’s really easy, just follow the instructions”.

I felt Rory was messing me about, so I asked another colleague who was also setting it up for his team. He told me that with Rory’s link, there was only one link within that page which showed you some sample configuration. Every other step listed wasn’t relevant. Yup, Rory was messing me about.

Once set up, you then get a “permission denied” because Rory needs to give your team explicit permissions to contact the Report server. Of course, even though I told him I was setting it up at the start of the day, he hasn’t bothered adding me to the authorized users. Instead, he then wants me to send a request on his Slack channel before he will grant me access.

The thing is, several other teams also needed to set it up, and they went through a similar process of being messed about.

Why didn’t he write some custom instructions? Most of the configuration could just be copied from one team to another.

Also, he always waited until teams were stating they were getting the “permission denied” before granting them access. Why couldn’t he just add them when they initially requested the instructions?

Absolutely infuriating.