Managers visiting India

In recent times, our HR Director reiterated that for UK workers, there are no plans to return to the office and we will continue to work at home. However, our Indian workforce will be. It sounded like it was some government-mandated thing.

I suppose it is great news for managers and directors because they love making any excuse to go over there for a week for “work” then post about the sights and local cuisine.

Days after the HR Director had spoken about how “home-working was the way forward for the company”:

“Caroline and I had a long chat when we were back at the hotel and talked about what we had learnt so far this week. We both concluded we need to have more fun at work, see people face-to-face more often and continue to have new experiences as that helps with personal growth.”
HR Director

How does she not realise the hypocrisy of her statement? It wouldn’t surprise me if she u-turned and told us to go back to the office.

Meanwhile the CTO finally realises developers are actually important (whilst sampling the local cuisine, of course):

“One of the highlights of my trip was getting to know the team on a more personal level, through lunches, dinners, and working sessions. I have come away from the trip with a newfound appreciation for the vital role that our developers play in our company’s success, and for the amazing work that they do every day.”
CTO

How can you be one of the leads for the Development department and not realise that software developers are the key part of a company that sells software?

I’m sure they mean well, but the more you think about it, the worse it seems. It also seems like he appreciates the Indian workforce more than the English ones.

Colin: How was their visit?
Jeeva: "They are very busy, we got 6 minutes of their time”.

Why so specific? I wonder if that is a cultural thing. Indian’s seem to do it with job experience. Us English just round up or down to the nearest half-year, but they like saying they have “2.2 years of C# experience”.

The Expo

Despite other departments in our company arranging optional meetings to explain what they do, in a recent survey, colleagues had apparently said they don’t have visibility of the wider business. The directors decided to create what they called “The Expo”. This was a mandatory all-day event located about an hour away from our main office.

The Registration

We got told to sign up via an Events Company’s website and the instructions we were given didn’t match my experience at all. We were told by visiting the website via the link in the email, it would auto-populate with our names. Yet the first question on the page was to ask for my name and email, and only then did it display back to me. We were also told to ignore the displayed cost because it would be the company that would be charged and not us personally – yet it displayed as “free”. There was no information in the email about how we would travel, but then one of the questions on the survey was asking us how we would arrive at the venue. It was only when I tried the “coach” option did it then state it would pick us up from the office on the day, but didn’t state the time. I then expected that information in the confirmation email, but it was only a week before the event I was told the pickup was 7:50am which meant I would probably have to wake up at 6:30 to make sure I didn’t miss it.

Despite the usual reminders that travelling by personal car on company time would invalidate your insurance (since you need to be covered by business insurance), I suspect most people went by car because there were only around 20 of us on the coach.

The Arrival

As we headed towards the venue, some of the senior management handed out notebooks but no pen. The notepad did have the schedule printed on the front which was useful. Since they told us to dress smart, most of us didn’t bring bags, so we had to inconveniently carry a notebook around all day.

The Event

Most of the day was sat in a large meeting hall watching presentations from the heads of various departments and directors. They used the opportunity to present the Employee of the Year awards. The thing is, we periodically watch presentations like this remotely, so it seemed a waste to make people from across the country to travel to an event like this. Some people travelled hours, and stayed in a hotel on company expense, and I just didn’t see how it could possibly be worth it.

“can’t believe we have so many people turning up”
Event organiser

You invited the entire company and said it was mandatory, what did you expect?

The Call

As it approached lunchtime, during one of the presentations, I noticed a developer checking his phone and looking concerned and then he walked out. During lunch, I was talking to another developer in the team. He started looking at his phone, then handed me his plate and told me to hold it while he goes to take a call. Several minutes passed and he hadn’t come back, so I was there awkwardly holding 2 plates. There were no tables and the room was packed with people so there was nowhere to put it. Eventually, I just had to bin it. When I saw them later in the day, they said there was a Major Incident so were called to a room to investigate remotely. So a few developers and the directors were all gathered around 1 laptop, knowing there wasn’t much we could do.

That’s another disadvantage of one of these all-day events. No one is working, and urgent issues like this can’t be addressed and just adds extra stress.

The Stalls

Another part of the day was walking around some stalls. It was like a careers fair but you already work for the company that they are promoting. Also, since there were that many of us, we were split into 2 groups, and since I was in the second batch, all the free stuff was gone. I could have grabbed a free pen for the notepad.

I didn’t really get the motivation for actually approaching anyone on the stall to listen to them reel off a speech that they would have been saying on repeat hundreds of times throughout the few allocated hours. Wouldn’t it have been better if these were also presentations in the main hall, then they only have to do the presentation once, and everyone gets to hear it?

I suppose the more socially outgoing types might be in their element, but I was just walking in circles, pretending to look busy. Eventually, I got talking to some old team mates and we were commenting on how bizarre the entire thing was.

Software Development Stall

For Development, the manager who volunteered to run our stall said he planned on using a darts game but using “magnetic” darts so it wouldn’t violate Health and Safety. The “Fun Police” busted him though – Health and Safety deemed it unsafe since throwing something would involve swinging your arm back and that is dangerous.

I’m not sure if things have changed from a few years ago, but we have had office parties with a Bucking Bronco, Bouncy Castles and similar games. I think every year 1 person has had some kind of injury using those, but it never stops us organising things the following year.

The replacement game was a “guessing game”. It was a vague question like:

“Guess how many minutes were saved in a 2 month period during our “COVID” release?”

The manager was insistent that everyone should guess, and was demanding I submit a number. I didn’t understand how people were coming up with the numbers. I kept on asking questions but I got the impression even the figure they had was some exaggerated figure. I asked

what was the feature?
how was it measured?
Why are we measuring in minutes when the figure appeared to be large like 20 mill minutes.

After the event they announced that guesses ranged from 100 minutes to 2 billion minutes! The correct answer was 31.9 million minutes.

Evening Meal

Another part that wasn’t well thought out and a waste of money, is that they provided food at 4:30 but there was nothing scheduled afterwards. The coach was at 5:30 so I had to stay, but most people had no incentive to stay. So when food was served, there were probably only 20% of the people there, but they would have paid for food for everyone.

Feedback

I did wonder if people would give negative feedback for the event. It seemed rather pointless to me; a complete waste of money, and not really that feasible to try and bring the entire company in one building like that. I suppose the main COVID days are behind us, but it’s probably a bit of a health risk. I knew a few people that were ill after the event.

Loads of people actually stated positive feedback, but it was on Yammer, and people seem to use it to post overly positive statements. The only negatives were:

All I used the notebook for was the agenda on the back, which could have been printed on the back of the pass.
no pen
carrying around the notebook all day
restricted interactions,
lack of space while eating

Yet the positivity was flowing:

It was great to put faces to names – especially when it’s a team that you work closely with. It was also really nice to see people that I’ve not seen in over 3 years. Overall, a great opportunity.

I was reminded of the value of face to face interactions with colleagues across the business. Will be looking forward to future opportunities to meet in person.

I learnt more in one day about our business/products and services than I have in the year that I’ve been at the company. What an amazing ‘sheep dip’ opportunity to immerse oneself in the ‘what we do’ and ‘why we do it’ for our end Customers – fantastic !

Seeing people, I have not seen in over 3 years since working from home was great, as was meeting people I have never met in person before. Getting to meet them in the flesh and build further bonds was a great experience.

Having the opportunity to network on such a mass scale and learn about other departments that we may not have regular touch points with was invaluable.

It helped me appreciate how each and every department is working towards the same goal, and that we have a lot of exciting tech-for-good products!

Being just 5 months into starting with The Company I found The Expo a real success. Not only did it serve to educate as to the breadth of offering across the wider business but also reinforced the value and absolute quality of our portfolio. The insights to the wider business has reinforced key messages around data quality relevant to my customers within their world and how our unique offering can support and accelerate the valuable research they provide. This event really encouraged me to reach out across the wider business and was indeed an excellent platform for building an internal network. The Expo gave a real feeling that top down and bottom up you would get support.

Sometimes, being bogged down in the day job, it’s common to be disheartened by the day-to-day challenges we face and getting mired in the weeds: a classic case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. The Expo was a great opportunity to get the big-picture view and see how, by succeeding in the daily challenges, we are improving healthcare for huge numbers of people.

I’d been fortunate to have attended two other great opportunities to meet up face to face and network already this year, and still found this another great one to see even more people and catch up on common themes across the whole business. I always learn something both personally and about our products, on this occasion improving my knowledge of Project X particularly. The overwhelming reminder at the beginning of why we do it, the impact it has and why we should feel proud of where we work, is a welcome prompt to look up from the day to day challenges more often.

I met many more people face-to-face for the first time than I’m able to remember now and got a real insight from generally chatting to others around what different teams actually do, how and why. With the number of acquisitions we’ve done over the years it also helped me learn what some of the products we’ve acquired are as well as how they add value to our customers. It was great to see some of our Chennai colleagues at the event and hear how the services I work on day-to-day are used in the real world.

Hang on, they flew people from India over to England just for the event!? What a waste.

Mum’s frozen laptop screen

My Mum doesn’t call as much as she used to. So when I had a missed call from my Mum, I thought it could be an emergency. When I rang her back, she said her computer was stuck on the lock screen.

It’s hard work though because she is terrible at explaining problems or what she attempts to do, then she often finds it hard to understand my simple instructions.

She said holding the power button ain’t turning it off, which is weird. I thought the classic “turn it off and on again” would sort it out, so I said to “let the battery drain”. So she said “it can’t be the battery because she can see what is on screen”.

So I explained that the plan was that “letting the battery drain will turn it off. Then you can turn it back on again when plugged in“.

I couldn’t think of any other options.

She said she was “pressing Alt+F2 but it wasn’t doing anything”. I said “what does that shortcut do?“, and she said “I dunno“. I asked who told her to press it, and she said “myself“.＼（〇_ｏ）／

I wondered if she meant Alt+F4.

My Mum popped around to my house with her laptop. Clicking wouldn’t transition to the login screen, and you could move the mouse fine – so it wasn’t frozen. I pressed ctrl+alt+del and it unlocked. I locked it again and it went back to the login screen straight away and would respond to mouse clicks, so ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

I bet letting the battery drain would have solved it as well, but she kept on charging it. I do wonder if her fictional shortcut of Alt+F2 was meant to be ctrl+alt+del. This is what I mean when I say she is terrible at explaining problems or what she attempts to do. Then it ends up being frustrating for the both of us.

The takeover – the break’s over

Several months ago, I was on a social call with a few of my colleagues. We were talking about how our flagship product is really outdated but we had been working on a replacement for around 4 years without success. Therefore, the future looks bleak.

I made the point that if our rivals release their new software before we do, then we could be in serious trouble.

A colleague, Robin, agreed with me and stated:

“the only way we can stay in business is to rely on our competitors being worse than us”

Then added:

“we are Yahoo, waiting for Google to turn up”
Robin

I think the comparison is that Yahoo were quite a well-known search engine, but they didn’t build on what they had. So then Google came into the market with their superior search engine and not only took their market share, but then released products like Gmail which made Yahoo even more redundant. Yahoo ended up abandoning their own Search feature and used Google’s instead. Today, it seems they use Bing.

I’m not sure we would have the same opportunity just to back off and utilise our competitor’s features.

Robin then elaborated:

We have lost a lot of expertise over the years, so there’s large parts of our software we don’t truly understand. It’s essentially falling apart at this stage. We need to retire it. The sheer amount of technical debt is so bad that fixing technical debt is stymied by how much technical debt there is.
Robin

Shortly after, an American company placed a bid at a hefty 50% increase on share price. It was quickly accepted by the board who will be cashing in for millions.

“This is exciting for us. This is in recognition of the brilliant work we have achieved together in the past few years. It’s a recognition of success. This is about future growth, with potentially a new shareholder who can drive innovation, great service for our customers, and take us to the next stage. We believe this combination will have the resources and expertise to enable us to better support our users through technology innovations. Our long standing track record of delivering effective technology solutions and strong financial and operating performance combined with our partner Group’s resources and expertise will enable us to accelerate our development. We therefore consider that the combined group will be well positioned to serve its customers and partners in the UK, whilst ensuring we remain a strong organisation through technology innovation.”
Director’s corporate-jargon-riddled waffle.

A further update from the director’s was aimed to allay our fears of redundancy or general change to how we work. It was also full of the usual corporate jargon:

great for everyone, the employees, customers, the shareholders
Accelerating investment
redundancies: “Absolutely not the case. This is about growth.
genuinely really excited for this. Excited about the opportunities for individuals
Excited about the positive synergies between the two businesses
accelerate in research
“don’t worry because it’s going to be absolutely EPIC!”
Continue personal journey
accelerate our strategy, accelerate our roadmap, accelerate our customer base
gives our colleagues something to really relish
gunning for growth and innovation for some time. Completely in alignment with the direction we set.
no plan to change what we are doing in UK or India
unique culture that we will maintain and build upon
Benefits and conditions will remain (pensions safeguarded)

“clearly, what we are focusing on now, is making sure we complete the year”
At the end of the update, our CEO came out with this ominous statement

We are actually highly profitable (somehow), but that made it sound like we were struggling. Is there any doubt we will not see out the year?

I didn’t find many comments from our users posted on the internet, but a small group seemed to be concerned that our data would be owned by an American company. I think for the most part, and especially with our main software, we don’t actually own the data. Our users own the data and we are mainly the “data processor”. So if the American company wanted to buy us to get their hands on our data, then I reckon they would be doing illegal things, so that’s not a worry. I think it is merely a case of the American company wanting a profitable company and to get into the sector. They might be shocked when they find out our current software is really retro without much scope for growth, and the replacement is in “development hell”, and not worth the hype we gave it.

One user was saying that because the idea of Americans owning our data was “unethical”, they wanted to build their own system which would be ethical and not-for-profit. I did wonder if an open-source project could work – our system has essentially been built by hundreds of developers over 15 years. With hindsight, you could build something similar much quicker, especially if you focus on the core features. However, the architecture is a massive problem and costs loads to run. It would take at least 5 years before you had enough features to get users to switch to your system. Then it would still need to be funded to keep running. I think even the big open source projects have salaried software engineers because you cannot just rely on ad-hoc contributions.

Like I said, we have struggled to build our own replacement which is in “development hell”. That’s with full-time staff and loads of managers to coordinate it. Then we were talking about trialling a version which is basically just an RSS feed after hyping it up 4 years ago.

I was discussing this conversation with one of our Software Architects, and he said the open source idea could only feasibly work if an existing company like ours made our product’s code open source; so it was already complete and the architecture was in place. Then the contributions would be to add features, and make it more performant.

“Well, they certainly can’t make them any worse! That wheel of death that says ‘loading’ just goes round and round forever!
A user on the takeover, and our software’s recent performance issues

Back to the takeover, it will be interesting when/if the takeover fully completes to see what the American company plans to do with us. I’m intrigued if our Director’s statements have any truth.

Note: I stole the blog’s title from the Fall Out Boy song “The Take Over, The Breaks Over”

Merge Ready Checklist

We have a small team of people that are known as Tech Quality Assurance. They are comprised of a group of experienced ex-Test Managers, although I often think they can’t have learned much in their experience due to some of the ideas they come up with or how unaligned they are with their communication.

A few years back, there was a project I was working on which was near completion and I got asked to fill in a “Merge Ready Checklist“. I was like “errr, what’s this?“

If the QA team are going to introduce a new process, shouldn’t this be communicated when it was created?

I looked through it, and most of the evidence they wanted were aspects that you needed to be aware of up front, so you could track them, and gather evidence as the project progresses. When I saw it, I thought it wouldn’t be possible to be allowed to merge. Even some of the simple stuff like:

“Branches are expected to be kept in sync with root development branch on weekly basis. Provide evidence of the frequency you were merging from Main and the date of the most recent merge.”
process on branch-merging

I merged when I wanted, so what are they gonna do? reject it because I didn’t merge enough? The branch history is the evidence, why is it worded as “provide evidence“. Why not just ask for the link to the code branch?

They then insist on having Test Coverage of 80% which I always think is an unreasonable ask. When I joined Development, we had Visual Studio Enterprise licences which have a Test Coverage tool available. However we have since downgraded to Professional. So I ask what Test Coverage tools we can use because it needs to be something that IT have approved to download, and that we have a licence for. We were told we could use AxoCover, but I found it wasn’t compatible with Visual Studio 2019 or above, which was an inconvenience.

Ok, so let’s run it and see what happens. Firstly, you are greeted with a phallic symbol.

Test execution started.
         ___
        /    \
        |     |
        \    /
        /    \
       /      \
___/        \___
/                      \
|     _______     |
\__ _/        \___ /
AxoCover Test Runner Console

It’s supposed to look like their logo, which looks more like a fidget-spinner.

Then I can’t even make sense of the statistics? Is that saying that I have removed methods, and deleted tests? I have added a few classes with several methods each (these obviously contain lines of code and conditional statements so I expect all values to be higher. I had also added some Unit Tests but maybe would have expected 30% on new code.

I asked Tech QA to explain the figures to me, and they were like “we dunno, we aren’t developers. We just look for the 80% number“. Then I point out that they were supposed to be judging the 80% coverage on NEW CODE only. This is for the entire solution file. So this doesn’t give them the evidence they want, and it’s not accurate either and cannot be trusted.

After running it several times and adding/removing code to see how the numbers changed, I then was suddenly low on disc space. Turns out Axo Cover reports are 252MB each! Yikes.

They also wanted you to run the static analysis tool Sonar, but with the licence we paid for, we could only run it on our Main branch. So we need to merge our project in to run Sonar, but they want the Sonar results to authorise if we can merge it in. The classic chicken and egg scenario. Later on, we did get better licences to run Sonar on our project branches.

When we submitted our Merge Ready Checklist to the best of our abilities, we got the following feedback:

“TechQA have reviewed the MRC and assessed it with a critical level of risk. There are a number of items that we would deem vital to address however even resolving these items – it would leave the project at critical.”
We failed the Merge Ready Checklist

Surely that is the biggest rejection. Even resolving the issues won’t change their judgement.

We arranged a meeting with them to discuss the way forward. At one point they said:

“These are all things that are too late to address but are common themes we raise time and time again and significantly reduce confidence in the quality of a release.”
TechQA

Surely that’s a problem with their communication. So the process is just sprung on teams when they want to merge in, then the problems aren’t even fed back into the system/communicated to other teams so they can’t learn from it, and then they proceed to fail.

I then asked the release manager what we can do, and he said that the TechQA team are there just to advise him what should and shouldn’t go in the release. Due to contractual deadlines, he just lets projects go in anyway as long as the team explains what bugs they are aware of. All the other aspects like Sonar and Test Coverage don’t bother him at all because it is more “Technical Debt” and not really that reflective of the user’s experience.

So what we are concluding is that the TechQA team are completely pointless and we may as well save money by binning them off, because they are just creating processes that no one cares about, and aren’t enforcing anyway.

It looked like they were also doing these for another company we acquired. I found this on another team’s review:

It should come as no surprise that the assessment of the MRC comes out as critical.

The “Definition of Done” specified in the document is not the one followed by the team as you point out that no testing was part of the user story and a Product Owner was not attached to the project towards the end and therefore could not do the PO review.
Also, no unit tests exist for the code and there is no ability to confirm the changes have not degraded any quality metrics.
Elements of the regression plan have not been run and once again the team have not been given sufficient time to consider quality.
On top of all that the code is written in Visual Foxpro which was EOL’d by Microsoft in Jan 2010, that’s 11.5 years out of support!

An example for the other week saw the lead developer give a lot of backchat to TechQA.

"Link is to a PR not to a build - where do I go to see the state of the build"
 > All PR's into master need a passing build. If you would like a hand using Azure DevOps please let me know and I'll see if can find time to show you how it works. 
 
"there must be some sort of output that can be used as evidence surely"
 > Once you have looked at the build, you can also view the 35k passing unit tests. 
 
"Need some evidence of your test coverage levels in the form of a report or chart from the text coverage tooling you are using"
 > You can see the tests written in the PR to master. Each PR for the new work was accompanied by tests.
 > Coverage Report attached for the impacted code, although code coverage is a useless metric.
 
 "Sonar - Please provide evidence when you have it available"
 > If the work is ever completed, then we will have automatic sonar reports for projects.

No idea why he doesn’t have Sonar running, but he obviously doesn’t care enough, and definitely doesn’t care about Test Coverage. I do find it strange that we have been using Azure DevOps for years now, and TechQA still don’t know how our development process works – and you would think it would be a prerequisite for them to do their work.

They should be liaising with the Development team in order to create processes that are feasible, useful, and accurate.

Employee of the Month

Managers seem to love the concept of Employee of the Month/Quarter/Year. On paper, it sounds good because it recognises the efforts of an employee, but I often find that managers don’t really understand the effort that goes into something, and they also don’t have knowledge about the entire development process.

So what will happen – is that there will be a shortlist of nominations, then managers will get together and debate on who should win. Some of the nominations will have been highlighted by any staff members, but some will be the manager’s own opinion. Regardless, the emphasis is really delivered by the manager who is representing the nomination. So a more persuasive manager will hype up their candidate more than someone with less persuasive skills.

As an aside: as a non-manager, I can only judge by their description of why they gave the award, and I might have my own view on who deserved it based on my limited knowledge of the projects that I have heard about. So their judgement may be misguided, but so is mine because I also don’t have full knowledge across the department.

Another thing to bear in mind is that managers can be biassed towards the financial gains of the project. Team members don’t decide what projects they work on, so as long as they don’t completely mess up the project, sometimes it seems pre-determined who wins.

I remember talking to a colleague whose team had won the “Team of the Quarter” award. He said it was an absolute joke because the project had overrun by 3 months or so due to mistakes within the team. He said there were all kinds of arguments and team morale was low. They knew they had cost the company money, but the late fines were insignificant compared to the money they gained when the project was delivered. Then, because it was worth loads of money, the managers gave them the award and cited “tough challenges” that were overcome.

Recent Awards

Strangely, in our last awards ceremony, an award was given to a team whose analysis and discussions led to the cancellation of one of the highest-value projects we had gone for in recent years. The CEOs seemed to make a big joke out of it, but were probably crying on the inside as we had not only paid 20+ people a year or so salary, but lost out on potentially millions of revenue.

There were also some great examples of somewhat-predetermined winners. The team leading the “Employer Of Choice” scheme won an award based on “improving work conditions“. Who else was gonna win that? The team was literally formed with that objective. Should you get it for merely delivering it, or should it only be given if you exceed it?

There was a recent problem where some users were experiencing a 20 second wait time to load up a customer’s record. A developer was assigned to the bug and put out a fix. He won a “customer satisfaction” award. Whichever developer was assigned to that was gonna win – it wasn’t anything to do with his contribution at all. The thing is, if you look at his change, and look at the code review, it was a bigger team effort:

2 expert developers had left all kinds of comments on his review and made him come up with an alternate fix. So the solution he came up with by himself wasn’t adequate.
One of the comments stated how his fix simply moved the problem from “first load of a customer record” to “when the user logs in”. This was stupid for 2 reasons. That very same developer had fixed a problem with excessive login times 2 months prior so he should know it wasn’t a good idea to extend the log-in time. Secondly, some users like System Admins may never look at customer records, so extending their login time in order to save time when loading records is terrible.
Then the developer had also stated that part of the actual fix was created by a senior developer.

So really, barely any of the solution was actually produced by the developer that won the award. It was a team effort and they didn’t get recognised.

What annoys me, is it was for the “Year” period, but some nominees had already won when they did “Employee of the Quarter”, so they ended up winning twice. I suppose it is stupid if you don’t win the Quarter award but then win for the Year, but maybe they could have come up with different categories, so you can’t win both.

In recent times, we have been producing some video interviews with the winners along with the people that nominated them for the award. The video is full of soundbites and emotional music. It’s so unbelievably pretentious. One video was hyping up a newly-hired manager’s Employee of the Quarter award:

“That’s what I have brought to the business. Don’t make a decision unless you understand all aspects of it.”
Winning manager

Kinda sounds like he is having a dig at the current managers and their rash decisions!

“interpersonal connectedness. He is driving that agenda which is great”
The nominator

“I’ve got a long way to go but yeah, I’ll get there, and I’ll bring the business with me”
Winning manager

My Win?

Several years ago when I was a Tester, there was one particular awards ceremony that I’ll never forget. When the awards were read out, the managers created tension by reading out what the winner did before announcing the person’s name. So they were like “this person worked on Project X, and this person took on challenge Y, showed positive attitude” etc. I couldn’t believe it because it described my work in my team! I was overjoyed how my team had recognised my work over the months and had put me forward. In that team, I had successfully delivered the previous project when I was the only Tester and we had no assigned Team Lead. Then I had moved onto a new project with the same team, plus one new problematic team member. I felt like I deserved something to make up for the fact we had a really problematic team member who caused me a lot of stress. Then when they finally read out the name – they gave it to the problematic team member! I nearly swore and stormed out of the room.

Virtual Praise Cards

We did come up with some virtual praise cards that you can send to your colleagues. There’s certain people that frequently give them out, so it leads to the same names that gain them. Often you see them just handed out for doing basic things. Like I was saying before; you are just literally doing your job and you get praise. There was one that I was joking about with my colleagues because it just seemed like – either the employee was trying to get in his manager’s good books, or was just having a laugh with the system.

“Thanks for sharing the updates time and again. Literally under good leadership.” – Praise card for a manager

I also got quite a few of these cards during the first year of them being implemented, but then it seemed like a fad and I have rarely received them since.

LinkedIn Learning

I was recently watching a course on LinkedIn Learning about “Recognizing and rewarding great performance”. There were some good lessons in there:

Employees will respond more to non-money recognition once they are already paid fairly
Monetary reward should be proportional to the work value. If they save the company £10000, don’t reward them a measly £20.
High performers are best rewarded with growth opportunities
Peer to peer recognition is powerful
Be careful with incentives that creates more losers than winners. – might not help people you are competing against
Be mindful that incentives can be manipulated
Flexibility is a reward every employee can appreciate. Extra day off.

The new Ux designer

In a recent blog, I remarked how we always seem a bit short-staffed when it comes to our UX team, who come up with the User Interface designs, provide icons, and write the user-facing text that appears on buttons and dialog boxes.

On our stand-up update, a developer, Andy, was explaining his interaction with a new member of the UX team. Just like a lot of recent hires, it seems we have just hired anyone that applied.

Andy wanted an icon, and they sent him a screenshot of the icon rather than the actual file.

So he asked for the actual icon file, and they sent him an icon file but it looked a bit different from the screenshot.

So he questioned if it was right, and they sent him the icon he expected, but he noticed it had a transparent background and he wanted white.

She is like “it is white, you can see it on my screenshot”, and he is like “no, it is showing as white because the graphics program’s background is white.”

It’s very alarming that we are hiring a UX designer that doesn’t seem to understand the concept of transparency and doesn’t understand to send the files she creates rather than screenshotting them. ¯\_( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)_/¯

Timesheets

Government Tax Credits

Many years ago, managers asked us to start filling in a Timesheet. They were adamant it wasn’t used to actually track what we were doing, and accepted we may inflate the actual hours to fill the working day e.g. we might have been chilling for 2 hours but then claim we did the full 7.5 hours on a project.

They implied it was to help them claim for some “UK Government Tax Credits” which was some kind of tax rebate for companies involved in “innovation“.

The thing is, I think 95% of our work is contractual so we have been given some requirements by our main customer, and we implement it. So it’s not driven by our own creativity in the hope that people want it. It is driven by the customer who already announced they will pay. Therefore, I think our claims were probably a tax scam. That’s my opinion though, and based on no legal understanding.

One day, I got an email from auditors KPMG. I wasn’t going to lie, so I told them it was simply making a few changes to allow the feature to work for a different country. Also, it got cancelled.

KPMG Audit

I am from the audit team at KPMG and have been given your contact details by the group finance team and have a couple of questions regarding work on a specific project in the year.

Group finance have recorded that you have spent 1/2 of your time in 2018 on the Scotland project. Could you please confirm this through answering the following questions:

1) Please can you describe the nature of the project we have selected for testing? (i.e. is this project to do with maintaining existing software, or enhancing/building new software)

2) What’s the status of the overall project? (i.e. how far from completion? / have any issues been encountered which you are struggling to resolve?)

3) Does the attached percentage of your time appear an appropriate representation of the proportion of time you spent working on this project at this time?

4) How do you record your time, and do you know how the percentages we’ve outlined to you are derived?

If you could send your response directly to me by the end of the day that would be great.
KPMG

I wonder what they did with my response telling them the project got cancelled. I also think the time spent wasn’t correct. In different years, I have known other people get contacted with wildly inaccurate times as well, so I have no idea how the times we enter in the timesheet somehow become completely different figures when reported by the Finance department.

New Timesheet Meeting

It was my understanding that the entire business (or at least anyone involved in software) filled in their timesheets. But then more recently, we were all asked to join a meeting about timesheets, and I was surprised at how many people were protesting about this “new policy“. Even people working on the same software as me said they hadn’t had to fill it in. So I had been filling it in for years after being told it was mandatory, but then it seems it wasn’t – depending on which team you were in.

There were quite a few companies we had acquired over the years which also hadn’t been asked to follow this process.

This is what we were told:

Purpose & importance of timesheets

Resource plans only forecast the allocation of people and time. Timesheets provide actual and factual data which provide the following main areas of value to the company.
The ability to improve our scheduling — we can use this data to better plan in the work we have for the department at a team and individual level.
The ability to improve our forecasting — by reviewing Forecast vs. Actual time we become more knowledgeable and therefore accurate in our forecasting process, this improves our understanding of what and for how long our teams need on various items of work.
The ability to understand what things cost — by understanding how much time is spent we can get a generalised view of how much the work we do costs. This is important for both budgeting and recognition of capitalised revenue – It also helps us know what to charge our customers where appropriate.
The ability to understand if we are efficient — by understanding how much actual time is spent on various activities versus what was allocated we can get a view on what disrupts our plans, by how much and who is impacted. We can then use this data to mitigate this.
Person specific salary information is not used to calculate cost; finance use a generalised role-based approach and the SFIA framework.

Discussion

We were told that “Contractors are not applicable for Timesheets“. Why? Surely this goes against all the reasons why they want to do timesheets, to estimate the time and money cost of projects and improve forecasting. If outsourcing isn’t logged, it gives a false impression.

Some people were asking questions like “What’s the maximum/minimum hours to be logged per day and per week?“. Is that them admitting they had no idea what their contracted hours were?

In similar fashion, you would get people who work part time asking questions such as: “I don’t work Fridays, do I need to log anything for that day?“

Also, in a similar fashion, some people wanted to admit they didn’t really do their contracted hours, but had to inflate it to overreport it. I suppose if they want to know how many days/weeks projects are taking, then recording how many hours you have been slacking does make sense:

“When I started recording timesheets in this system I was putting in less than my contracted hours, and then got a message saying the timesheets were incomplete. I now record all of my contracted hours. Let me know if this isn’t what you want.“

Then you had people with the opposite problem

Should we accurately record the number of hours worked, or should our timesheet always add up to 40 hours a week regardless of extra hours done?“

Some Tech Lead/Architect-type staff made a good point that since they work across projects and will help others when needed, they won’t have that “project task” on their timesheet because they haven’t been assigned to that project:

“I do a lot of work doing “consultancy” for projects that I’m not formally allocated to, so naturally those projects are not in my “Tasks” list. Am I expected to try and find project codes for each of these (and get allocated to those projects even for a bit of one-off help) or should I just use ‘BAU’ (Business as Usual) for that?”

Another architect said his work actually spanned multiple projects because he was working on something that is a prerequisite for both projects. So would that mean he just halves the time against 2 projects?

In a similar fashion, sometimes problems arise with some legacy system, and the experts in that field will have to investigate or even fix the issue. Does this then just go down as a generic “Out of scope” item? That sounds like something that is important to track.

Some people were moaning that they might already fill in some time against their assigned Bugs (which was their specific team’s decision), but now they have to also report the time into this central system.

I think there’s plenty of aspects that are open to interpretation or people’s preferences. I noticed we have a “Meeting” task, but when there’s a meeting about your project, then shouldn’t that just be logged as Project Work, and then Meetings should be for non-project meetings? Then sometimes we have optional meetings where someone is demoing their project, or another department is announcing some news. Is that a “Meeting” or is that “Out of Scope”, or if it is educational, should it go down as “Personal Development”?

So it seems the simple idea of creating a timesheet has loads of complexity that a lot of people haven’t considered. I suppose the answer comes down to what you actually want to measure and why?

The manager’s response to the questions about “if the time needs to add up to your contracted hours” – was that “the time should be accurate and it shouldn’t just be ‘adding up to something!’”. But the system doesn’t really support that. There was a time where a teammate’s time was erratic and he was starting at 2pm and sometimes staying late, or sometimes doing extra time on different days. So instead of doing a consistent 7.5 hours a day, his timesheet looked more like 2, 7, 13, 7.5, 9.5 etc, and it got flagged up as being inaccurate.

This was a brilliant quote from a colleague:

“the only accurate timesheets are the ones when I am annual leave”

Someone came up with an interesting idea. Since many people will just slap 7.5 hours against their project across 5 days, and we all know the timesheets aren’t going to be accurate, can’t we just assume if someone is assigned to a project, they automatically get 7.5 hours assigned to it, unless they log tasks on the contrary e.g. out of scope work, sick leave, holiday?

“No” was the answer because that’s not how the Time Sheet system is designed. It is a good idea though.

There was one guy called Jason who was constantly moaning. I’d seen him on other calls and he seemed quite problematic. I could imagine he is the sort of person that would get sacked at one point for his problematic and negative attitude. The manager leading the call somehow remained patient with him, and came out with this quote which was a great response considering how frustrated she must have felt:

“I can’t work miracles Jason….I am telling you how I can help you right now”
Manager

Sounds like a film-quote.

Delayed reporting of Major Software Incidents

Process Problem

A few years ago, there was a period of time where I ended up being on the calls after a Major Incident (MI) with our software was declared. I was amazed at the clear failings with the process. There were all kinds of various managers, then maybe a few people from Deployment, but then barely anyone from Development.

Then you’d have these managers just theorising if the Incident was caused by hardware or software, and if it was software – which enhancement/bug fix could have caused the issue?

It was pure guesswork of course, and occasionally they were right, but what is the point theorising when you could just get the people involved that can actually investigate it?

Sometimes I would hear about a Major Incident and then see that it was actually logged days ago. I think a problem is all the process between Support and Development. Support log incidents in their system and talk about “customer reference numbers”, but we need it in our system which is currently Azure DevOps and we talk about Work Item numbers.

So sometimes there might be a delay even logging it in Support, and then there is a delay until it actually gets transferred over to our system. Often we are on these calls and we ask for a Work Item number so we can read information rather than just waiting for someone to mention it on the call… and then we are told that they haven’t created a Work Item yet.

I remember a time when users complained to Support, then they logged a Bug straight away, and did really good investigation. Then it would come to us with full details. Now, users complain for weeks, it gets escalated up to the Directors, then comes down the Development managers to Colin, then we have barely information to look into it because the users haven’t provided it, or is just “Chinese Whispers” and the information gets lost.

It’s so frustrating because how can you attempt to diagnose anything without all the required information? So the call is pointless, but when you do have the information, then you don’t want to be on a call – you want to go and start looking into it because you want to diagnose it then fix it.

So let’s look at one of the last examples I was involved in…

Example

Colin messages me about a Major Incident.

“I need some investigation…”
Colin

Apparently 179 sites are complaining about this problem and threatening to leave. Despite being complaining since the Friday release, Colin only knows about it Wednesday. Classic. Not the first time this has happened.

So what can I investigate? What is even the problem? All I know is there is a problem with a certain feature, but the thing is, we integrate with several third party API’s and I haven’t been told which one it involves, and I don’t know what the problem the users are seeing is.

I ask Colin to elaborate:

“not sure which provider. Can we look into all of them? So one of them may be broken, but we need to look at them all and hope we find it”
Colin

Wut. You want me to test them all out and hope I notice a problem? But it could involve just one and require specific steps.

When I finally got some information, it was pretty sparse.

“between 2 minutes and 12 minutes for the dialog to pop up”
the problem

I told them I would have to see it happen, and see if there is anything different the user is doing to make it go from 2 minutes to 12 minutes. It sounds like a network issue, or not our fault.

“we will test it with a happy…well not a happy user, but an ‘engaged’ user”.
Manager’s suggestion of arranging a call with a user to witness the problem

I was then on a call with all kinds of random managers, all chipping in speculative accusations. “It’s a problem with the deployment“, “it’s a problem with the amount of data in their Tasks module“, “it’s a problem with the number of user-created resources“.

Colleague Opinion

I was discussing this with one of my colleagues and he re-iterated my views:

"they red flag anything nowadays - they just wave their flags around
It’s always the case that someone knew several days ago, but now it needs fixing immediately and it’s the first time any developer has heard about it

why can it not go:
Problem logged by customer -> Support discuss with Release Management -> Release Management arrange call with the correct Team Leader -> Prioritises the work with a developer and tester

I don't see how that's difficult

What actually happens:
Problem logged by customer -> sits in a list for a while
Problem management person looks at issue -> sits in list for a while
Someone kicks off and escalates the issue -> Director gets it in the neck -> Release Management notified
Release Management hold a call -> float many theories about what the issue is about
Developer randomly hears about issue -> mistakenly joins call mid-flow -> explains that it's probably related to the work item with the same keywords as the issue in the title
Developer now late with their own work
Release management say they'll prioritise the issue, but asks if you could start working on it -> Developer says no because you are busy working on 8 different things -> everyone in a huff
Team Leader nowhere to be seen -> likely watching the TV"

Apparent Analysis

A manager recently posted an update with facts that I was sceptical of:

“Analysis conducted into 2 years worth of Major Incidents

Some interesting trends have appeared and I think it’s worth discussing:

Data shows that most of the MIs are caused by either a 3rd party or tech debt/ops related issues. The number attributed to code change is pretty low.
We are lacking ownership around domains for existing products so not obvious which Engineering Manager is accountable.
We don’t have enough SQL skills to manage our complex DB
We rely upon a small number of people to investigate MIs.
MIs should be owned with the right teams.
Further investigation required on this and changes to ownership, structure, investment needs to happen.”

Release at Pace

Another interesting claim was made by another manager:

“There’s lots of interesting developments going on at the moment; we’re delivering more than ever before.”
Manager claim

I message the Software Delivery Manager to ask if there is any truth in that, because I thought we were releasing at the slowest pace.

“Who knows? I reckon one of those blaze statements that people just say to make it sound good”
Software Delivery Manager

On a recent Development meeting, one person posed a question to the Head of Development:

“Deploying software at speed is ultimately what we want to do as a business. However, this can come at a cost. We have had more Incidents in Q1 caused by software defects than we did in the whole of last year! How do we ensure the deployed code is at the quality required if we are going to deploy at speed?”
Staff member’s concern about software quality

If we deliver more changes, I suppose there is more risk of introducing more bugs. If you are rushing, then you are more likely to create Major Incidents. I suppose you can say it is fine if there’s more bugs in general, but all considered low severity.

The Rapid Responders Group

As a response to this, I think Colin came up with the idea of the “Rapid Responders Group”

“We are deploying our software at a pace we have never done before, so we can miss scenarios that could happen in the production environments as we have seen in the last two MIs. If we can get information straightway, we can investigate the issue straightaway. We all have access to the Live environment. With our technical ability, we might be able to see things that other people might not, so this is why I have assembled this team.”
Colin on his new idea

However, it was quickly shot down by one of our architects and never mentioned again.

“With one of the MIs, there was absolutely nothing we could’ve done between the people in this channel to anticipate that as it relates to a combination of live configuration and state that can’t be replicated.

In general the problems we have with the MI process is making changes takes too long due to processes and permissions, noise from the non-experts present (it’s hard to get a word in edgeways with some people), and multiple people bugging those performing the fixes/changes for updates (when it should be one person who fronts the technical team working on sorting it out)”
Architect

“We had first-hand experience of this on the last Major Incident call. We could have fixed it within 30 minutes but was on a call discussing it for hours.”
Colin

Architect:
It's usually the fault of those running the call or lack of confidence in Dev.
I will say when we have enough information to make a fix - that I'm departing the call to concentrate. As you say, it will otherwise go on for hours, with multiple people fronting opinions on the cause of the problem, unless someone identifies it with confidence and takes the initiative.

When an MI occurs, it's always the same group of people, which is often a pretty good mix, but first we need to identify the cause.

Usually it takes a long time for the details of the MI to be logged, particularly somewhere Development can all access such as a Work Item. If you miss the start of the call, it's difficult to know what the details of the original issue were: you can guarantee you missed something of importance.

I would suggest the following to help the diagnosis run more smoothly:

When a release is made, it must identify a point of contact for each change, preferably the team email address making the change.
When an MI is started, a brief description must be provided in written form and a source-of-truth record started (such as a Work Item).
The Release Point Of Contact list is emailed with details of the MI starting.
They might not need to join the call unless there is something they can add, but at least if they feel their input valuable to the diagnosis they can join or reply with details.
After identifying the team/person working on a fix, they are protected by a single manager. The manager will be responsible for communicating with the techies and the outside world, so they can concentrate. They will update the Work Item and email those who need to know progress, what the fix entails etc.
Work out a way to expedite changes to live and retrospectively log change requests

Principal Developer:
From the MI's I've been involved in, they mostly run smoothly - the only disruption is (as Mike said) people "sticking their oar in" and having a guess at what the problem might be - sometimes forcefully.

They are not always wrong, but sometimes it can distract from getting to the route of the issue, you need to have the confidence to talk over them and get the information you need, correct misunderstanding, and to keep the discussion on track. A lot of the time the initial presentation from support can be way off the mark, but that is true of most bugs we get due the lack of technical skill in support. Only the developers on the call are going to be able to diagnose a fault as a result of a code change.

The primary focus of an MI call is to restore service ASAP, exploring workarounds is part of the developers role on the call - can we change a stored proc / setting to improve things now? This helps users and gives development more time to work on a fix. Another role is to assist the wider business (especially those in the Safety and Governance roles) to understand the issue - is it as bad as initially reported, or is it worse!?

Once we know what the problem is, and how we will resolve it, then it is OK to drop off and work on the fix.

Conclusion

I think it is clear that too much time is wasted discussing the problem with the wrong people. Managers need to find the correct group of technical people, give them all the information they need, then give them time without hounding them – in order to actually fix it.