Poor Communication

I love writing stories about poor communication. This isn’t the worst by any means; given that the conversation lasted 7 minutes which is quick compared to some other conversations I have been enraged about. The thing is, it is still too slow. I get the question 4 minutes after him initiating the conversation by saying “Hi”. It took a further 3 minutes to get the actual problem from him.

Why couldn’t he have just said:

“Hey dude, when you checked in your code, did you encounter any test failures at all? I am getting these failures <insert link to failing build>.”

Ideal Conversation

Then I could understand the problem and context, and viewed the build output to work out what was wrong.

Here is the actual conversation:

[Yesterday 5:38 PM] Andrew
Hi
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[Yesterday 5:42 PM] Andrew
yesterday you checked in your code into the Main branch
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[Yesterday 5:42 PM] Andrew
did you face any build errors
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[Yesterday 5:43 PM] Me
No. It wouldn't have checked in otherwise. What's the problem you're having?
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[Yesterday 5:43 PM] Andrew
okay..because we are getting some build errors
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[Yesterday 5:44 PM] Andrew
just wanted to ask you
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[Yesterday 5:44 PM] Me
What are the errors?

[Yesterday 5:45 PM] Andrew
unit cases are failing 

<Shows screenshot of a message that says “There might be failed tests”. Pretty much useless>
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[Yesterday 5:45 PM] Andrew
in Configuration Manager

It’s frustrating constantly receiving small messages with barely enough information. I shouldn’t have to ask him twice what the errors are after being told there are errors.

Turns out he had missed the post by a developer stating that everyone must merge Main into their branch. His branch was a whopping 2 months out of date, which is pretty bad practice.