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.
Stranger Coding Tings 