How To Make Your Team Hate You #3

I was thinking about the colleagues I’ve legitimately despised (and it’s not just my opinion), and most of them have something in common: they have either been promoted, or told they will get promoted if they prove themselves, resulting in a change of behaviour. So here is story number 3, and hopefully the last one since I don’t have any more drafted up.

The Situation

I was once on a project where I was the only software tester. Usually, when it’s a proper project where it is going to span 3 months or more, then we would have at least 2 testers assigned.

I was well excited to show that I could handle this responsibility. The project went well, and I was well proud. That project was actually a prerequisite for something bigger, and yet again, I was looking forward to the challenge of the follow-on project.

Collectively, both projects were going to be a replacement for part of our software, but it was going to be phased over time. Therefore, it was important that the old version still worked.

So I looked at what the current system did and wrote all the features down. I then spent ages looking through all the Test Cases, comparing these to the features that I documented. Then I had to write the Test Cases that were missing. This probably took around a month of preparation.

Since the new version needed to do what the old one did, but might have done it in a different way, I basically had to duplicate every test, then start changing the steps accordingly.

Having this 100% complete test coverage worked well, and I knew people would be thankful for it in the future. Anytime a feature is changed, you know there are tests that you can run for your manual regression tests. I think every tester has been annoyed at some point; when they think a test should exist, but it doesn’t, so they have to begrudgingly write it.

I’ve done the work for them. I don’t think any other area of the system had this level of test coverage. No one can be annoyed about this can they?

As we moved onto the second project, I was told another Tester, Barbara was joining the team. I’m not sure if I was told explicitly, or if I just heard rumours, but I’m pretty sure I knew it was the case that – if Barbara did well on the project, then she would be promoted to Test Lead. Based on my performance over the years, and based on the project I had just finished, I think it should have been obvious to promote me to Test Lead. Maybe I was slightly annoyed, but I don’t think that had any affect on what happened next…

The Conflict

So Barbara joins the team and looks at the test cases. She wasn’t happy. Despite having that 100% test coverage, the tests were “too granular”. She says that when it comes to testing a particular feature, we would end up adding maybe 10-20 tests from my pack. She only wanted to run 1 or 2.

So she starts complaining at me, telling me I’ve wasted my time and I need to rewrite them. She likes the idea of “end-to-end tests” where one test actually tests several features and could describe what a user would do over a 5 minute period.

For example, I may have written a test that describes how to create a document, then another test how to print a document, then another test on how to email a document.

Her way of testing would be to include all the instructions for these 3 features and put them in one test – since a user may log in, create a document, email it to someone, then print a copy out for themselves.

I argued that my way is better, because if there is a bug involving email, you can just pick out the short test involving email. I’d be annoyed if I had to test printing it when it has nothing to do with the email bug fix.

“But that’s not how we did it in my old team!”

Yeah, but you aren’t in your old team. You’ve joined this one, and this is our process.

She used this statement multiple times about different aspects of how we work. I kept on explaining how if we work “agile”, we are supposed to come up with a process that suits us, and agree as a team. This process suited us, or at least it worked perfectly well before she joined our team.

Yet she comes in, kicks off a massive fuss to try and put her stamp on the team, and bypasses the correct channels for these decisions; which would have been the Retrospectives. I would have been happy to debate it in a meeting, rather than her dictating what I should do in front of everyone.

What Barbara did next was – run off to her manager, who happened to be my manager as well. But because my relationship with my manager was simply a professional one, and Barbara was very chummy with her, then our manager instantly backed Barbara.

So then I had to plan out which features made sense to use after each other. I spent 3 or 4 days planning this out. I spent more days writing them. I only wrote about 7. How many test cases did she write?

Zero.

Didn’t practice what she preached.

I was fuming.

When it came to testing the new features, she often volunteered to test the easier items, and gave me the harder items. I didn’t mind, because if she wasn’t on the project, I would have just done them all anyway.

What was infuriating, was that the next day, she would chat some nonsense about how she was too busy so didn’t have time to test it, so then asked me to test it instead. So I’d end up doing all the work. It’s just that it would take longer because I’d finish my work and have nothing to do, then the next day, I’d have to do her work that she was supposed to do. So the result was that we had 1 extra tester in the team, but productivity had halved.

She did this for weeks. It wasn’t a one off. Often, I’d look at her monitor and saw she was sending personal emails, doing online shopping, or just looking at news.

Then when it came to the stand-ups, where we stated to the rest of the team what we had accomplished; she then claimed that she did the work.

I was fuming. How could she say that when I was standing there with her? It’s plagiarism, and absolute lies. I complained to my manager. She refused to do anything. I was so tempted to walk out.

I’d never had that feeling of not wanting to go to work before, but some days I just didn’t want to go. I actually started looking for new jobs.

Sometimes when Barbara was away from her desk, I’d be ranting to my team. We were a close bunch on the initial project, but it just didn’t feel the same way. Soon I was brought into a meeting with the project manager who seemed to suggest I should apologise and try and get on.

I don’t get it. We were all close and worked well together. We delivered a project successfully on time. A new team member joins. Testing productivity is halved. There’s massive friction. Who do you think is the problem? You could easily verify my claim that she wasn’t doing the work. The test case runs are audited. My name would be on every one.

It seemed that Barbara had just sweet-talked everyone and they were determined to promote her regardless. As a Test Lead, you are supposed to have testing skills, people-skills and some management skills. Barbara wasn’t showing any of it. She was refusing to run test cases and she was causing friction. Productivity of the testing side was lower than when it was just me on my own.

Epilogue

So what happened in the end? Well, I was a bit unsure what I wanted in my career. I initially wanted to move up the ranks as a Tester, but it wasn’t happening. I did get the craving to be a Developer, and considered becoming an Automated Tester. I requested a change of role to a Developer since the Automated Tester role didn’t exist in the company. I’d be in the same department, but I knew I’d switch teams so would be away from Barbara. I just had to put up with another couple of months working with someone I despised.

I did get my internal move in the end. Barbara got her undeserved promotion. Years later she got made redundant. Better late than never.

For more in the series, see: How To Make Your Team Hate You #1 and How To Make Your Team Hate You #2

Return To Castle Monkey Ball

Someone has created a mashup of the games Super Monkey Ball and Return To Castle Wolfenstein. It’s Super Monkey Ball, but with the Wolfenstein theme. Check it out here https://nickireda.itch.io/return-to-castle-monkey-ball

You can whizz through the levels in several minutes, so it’s not much effort to give it a go.

Shelving, failed restart, then restarting a project

When we entered lockdown, there was a small project that was identified as urgent, and very helpful to our users due to the current situation. Originally, they estimated a simple change. So we make a change to one file. When testing it, we realise it didn’t send the information in the outbound messages to a third party. So we made further changes which were a few day’s work.

We then had a meeting with a few different types of managers. They wanted to know about our progress and they wanted estimates to finish the project. I thought it would only take a few weeks to test. However the Tester said it would take 3 months which I think he was just being extreme to cover his back. He did explain it was more complex than I had thought, but still – it was clearly over exaggerated. The Managers didn’t like the idea of having a Tester tied up for that long, so the project went “on hold”.

Months later, I was invited to a meeting to restart the project. A Project Manager was ranting that there was a financial incentive to get the feature out by the end of the year (2020), but if we deliver it late, then we miss the bonus. Even if we restarted straight away, we had left it too late – there was no way the testing could get done, and deploy in time to meet such a deadline.

The Tester stressed that my solution is just a prototype and needs to be reworked. In reality, it was fine as far as I was aware, but he was just buying extra time if we needed it. It was the Testing side of things that needed the focus. We needed to test these extra configurations, but a prerequisite was that we needed to understand how they were set-up.

I couldn’t really do much work until the Tester had done this extra testing to see if my solution covers all the different configurations he had come up with. However, the Tester was busy with some other work so he couldn’t do that for a few weeks. A few weeks later, a Product Manager messages me to ask when the project started. I delivered the bad news: “It hasn’t”.

A few more weeks go by, and we have a meeting with a new Project Manager. So we discussed the story so far with him. It was also announced that the Tester (who has all the knowledge about this project) would only be partially available – so needs to pass on his knowledge to another Tester.

Another week or so goes by and another meeting was arranged. We have a new Project Manager.

Ridiculous.

She starts making all kinds of demands about having all the usual Agile process. (User Stories with estimates etc). However, it’s a weird project because we have basically done the development and we just need to test. All this process seemed a bit overkill to us.

We had another “Project Kick-Off” meeting, and the Tester asked the Software Architect about setting up all these different configurations. The Architect then said the Tester had misunderstood and there was actually only 1 configuration.

This meant the testing time had been drastically slashed – you know; the exact reason why the project was delayed in the first place. So all these delays, extra meetings talking about the delay, all the meetings to rearrange the project; none of them actually needed to happen. We could have just completed the project when it was first assigned, additionally collecting that financial bonus.

The secret Touchpad features that Microsoft didn’t want you to know

I do love a stupid clickbait title. I’m sure Microsoft wants everyone to know these.

I always use a mouse and avoid using the touchpad. So I’ve only just discovered a bunch of touchpad shortcuts in Windows 10. Check these out:

2 finger swipe scrolls the page
Tap 3 fingers to open the start menu
Tap 4 to open the notifications panel
3 fingers swipe down to go to desktop
3 fingers swipe up shows all open windows, plus you can scroll down to see previously opened windows

Programming Podcasts

I’m always on the lookout for podcasts to listen to, but I think good software development ones are quite hard to find. There’s loads of languages out there, so you need to find ones based on languages you know or would like to know. Also, podcasts are audio only, so you are limited to what you can discuss, since many aspects would benefit from diagrams, or to see actual code.

I was listening to a particular podcast and thought I could review it on my blog. After typing up a draft, I held off publishing it because they have quite a big following and I was quite critical. After consideration, I’ve anonymised it somewhat, and tried to frame it more about Podcasts in general.

When I was learning about Web Development, I did want to learn more debugging tips. This particular podcast had an episode on debugging websites, so I eagerly listened to it. However, they didn’t talk about actually stepping through code using a debugger! They did partially talk about the newbie way of writing “console.log” statements in the code. I wasn’t impressed with this episode.

Another episode was discussing experiences of being a woman in the tech industry. This is fine; talk about what you know, what you have experienced. However, sometimes they went off on tangents talking about women specifically, and not in the context of software development. I think it was this episode where I wrote down this somewhat ironic quote:

“I get told I’m too emotional, do you know how angry that makes me?”
Woman developer on her critique from a Man

That did make me laugh out loud. She was totally sincere.

A few episodes have discussed doing presentations at Tech Conferences. I did watch a couple that I found recorded on Youtube and they did seem really impressive presenters. One of them presented at “Frontend Love” which is just a hilarious name. I think that’s why sometimes they brand it as “Frontend Developer Love” to make it sound less rude and more professional. I found it very strange that one of the hosts stated that sometimes they have signed up to conferences to talk about a specific topic, but they actually know absolutely nothing about the topic. The upcoming deadline then forces them to learn quickly. The thing is, surely your talk can’t be that interesting if you aren’t an expert in the topic you are presenting. I definitely wouldn’t want to put myself in that situation. What if someone asks you a question and you have no idea? You will look like an idiot. That brings me onto the next point…

I think it’s the same approach with many of their episodes. Host A starts talking about a topic, Host B asks a question to get more detail out of the statement, then Host A says “I don’t know, that isn’t in my notes”. Then at that point I realised they were just reeling off information from Wikipedia. What value does that give the listener? Anyone can read Wikipedia. We need “added value”; you need to talk about “lessons learned”, your opinion etc – just give us something more than an audiobook version of Wikipedia.

Compared to other programming podcasts, it hasn’t been as nerdy with its themes since it has mainly covered subjects relating to the industry (recruitment and conferences), rather than the subject of coding directly. Personally, I don’t think this is what I’d look for in a Programming Podcast.

One Podcast that I have enjoyed is Merge Conflict. Those guys talk about Android/Apple development, and “.NET”, and both James Montemagno and Frank Krueger seem incredibly knowledgeable in their topics. Never have I thought they were just reading from Wikipedia, they seem to have a deep understanding and plenty of experience in what they are talking about. Sometimes it might be more news-like, so they talk about upcoming changes to “.NET” or a new iPhone etc, but their experience of previous iterations means they can actually provide an opinion on the new features.Another one I enjoy is Fredrik Christenson who also posts them to Youtube. He keeps them concise, usually under 10 minutes and answers a question from his subscribers. He speaks purely from experience of the industry and has some good stories, or makes good points in general.

Software Testing – Can developers test?

A software tester created a presentation about “the role of a tester”, and discussed whether “software developers” make good “software testers”. I thought the presentation was a bit confusing, because in some parts it sounded like she was saying they can, but in other places, it sounded like a categorical NO.

I found this quote recently from Ron Gilbert, creator of computer games like Monkey Island and Thimbleweed Park. It covers “game development” specifically:

Don’t believe the myth that programmers can test their own code. They can’t. Programmers will test for all the conditions they can imagine, but a good tester will imagine many many more and players will try things programmers never even considered. Knowledge of their code is the achilles heel of programmers. I’ve had code I was 100% sure was rock solid, only to have one of our testers reduce me to tears. A good tester excels at poking your code in places you never considered. I’m not talking about your unit tested sort routine, I’m talking about complex puzzle logic and odd UI uses. It’s the stuff unit tests will never catch, but a good tester will. Testers are the unsung heroes of your team, treat them very well.
Ron Gilbert – https://grumpygamer.com/delores_dev

This is the way I see it:

There’s the concept of being “close to the code”. So the developer that wrote the code will test exactly how they implemented it – and not test the cases they missed; because they never thought of those scenarios in the first place.

A tester inside the company could be influenced by their relationship with the developer; have some unconscious bias about not wanting to find a flaw in their code because they don’t want to upset them.

A tester for a third-party has no connection to the code or the staff at the company. They can test it without any bias. Finding all bugs is a good thing, because it enhances their reputation and should help with repeat custom. This is a good rationale for why some companies choose to outsource the Testing aspect entirely.

When I have worked in small teams and there is a testing backlog, sometimes the developers will help out with the testing, but they won’t test their own work; they will make sure it was done by another developer. This helps alleviate the above point slightly.

I have heard many developers say “they aren’t testers”, “I don’t know how to test” etc and for the most part; I think that’s nonsense. If you understand code and how to use software, then you understand how to test it. Sometimes it is directly transferable skills, but I think sometimes you need to take a step back, “put on another hat” and try to look at it from another perspective. For example, you then think “If I was a user, what would I want to do?”, “if I hated the company and wanted to find a bug in the code, no matter what it is, what would I try?”. You poke it in different ways. I think if you fail in the skill of being able to “put on a different hat”, then Ron Gilbert is 100% correct.

Personally, I have experience as a software tester, and as a developer. I do think I test my own code better than many other developers – ones without that experience. However, I don’t think I test as well as I used to when I was testing someone else’s code. It mainly comes down to the point I mentioned earlier – the fact that you only test what you know you have implemented and don’t test the things you haven’t. I mean, if you did think of it earlier, then you would have implemented it.

numeronyms

When colleagues were talking about improving “accessibility” of our software, I saw them write “a11y” and wondered what crazy thing this was. It turns out it is a “numeronym” which is like an abbreviation, but really dumb.

What you do is keep the first and last letter, then any letter you remove between those, you count them, and put the number there instead. So there are 11 letters removed from the word “accessibility” so it becomes “a11y”. I also came across i18n (internationalisation), and K8s (Kubernetes).

This website has more information: https://a11yproject.com/posts/a11y-and-other-numeronyms/

I’d never really thought about what the W3 in “W3Schools” meant. Seems these stupid abbreviations have been around for years but haven’t really took off until recently.