Beavis is a software engineer that loves making excuses to avoid work. Beavis had a bug to fix in the same area that his previous fix was for. For his previous change he did ask:
“It’s a fix for the current release, so not sure if it goes directly in, or we Dev test before-hand.”
When developers say things like this, I do wonder how and when they test their changes. Do they just change a few lines, and “throw it over the fence” to the testers? Why does it matter what release it is for? “Oh it is for an urgent release? I won’t test it then”.
I don’t think he manually tested it, or even understood the overall context of his changes, but he did eventually add some unit tests which were logical and I believed would prove his fix would work.
The problem is now he has a new bug fix to do, and he still doesn’t understand the context. I was free so I was asked to help him.
For this change, we specifically needed to use a Virtual Machine. We were supposed to set them up a month ago, and Beavis had, crazily, logged 20 hours against this work on his timesheet.
Me: “Have you set up your VM?”
Beavis: “No”
Me: “OK, well that is going to take you the full day. So download the required programs and check out our source code”
I didn’t really expect it to take the full day. Maybe half a day, with a bit more time if there were problems somehow. I wanted to get a head start looking at the code so I had a better chance of training him later. I also thought if I allow him a day, at least it will lower the chances he is going to start coming up with excuses.
I began to look into the problem whilst Beavis was setting up his VM. The next day, Beavis doesn’t show up. The next day, Beavis returned to work but said he was having network/proxy issues so could not download the required software – so was stuck.
It took me a lot longer than expected, but even allowing Beavis 2 extra days, he still didn’t get ready. So I did it all myself.
Stranger Coding Tings 