Your Code Is Unstable

William sure has a knack for saying the wrong thing, leading to lots of wasted time.

William joined the stand-up and said that he needs a “stable” build of our code, so specifically wanted the Lead Developer to merge our latest changes into our “master” branch. He kept on saying our “master” branch was “unstable”.

Later on, he comes over to my desk, and I ask him what he means by “unstable” – since that implies there is some kind of crash and we didn’t know of any. He then replies:

“it doesn’t work”.

“what doesn’t work?”

“eeeeeeeer”.

He then asks another team member to explain, and his colleague ended up saying “the branch doesn’t build”.

Weird I thought, since it is a “gated build”; we can’t check in unless the build completes. Turns out the Lead Developer had bypassed the gated check and broke the build.

So we have gone from “It’s not stable”, to “it doesn’t work” to “it doesn’t build”. I don’t get how you can be that bad at communicating such a simple development concept.

Additionally, on the stand-up call, I felt it was very patronising to specifically ask for the Lead Developer to do a basic merge. As it turns out, he meant that the Lead Developer should sort it out because he broke it, but he never stated that was the cause of the issue. It would have been good to open the conversation with that fact. You know; give some context and background to what the problem was.