Shoes

Years ago, a manager had accidentally posted a link in the Discussion section of a Bug report. So they had a comment discussing a possible root cause, but then all of a sudden, had a link to a shoe website.

It looks like it may be a side effect of “Bug 512: Unable to edit a document”. It’s difficult https://www.startriteshoes.com/ to tell from the video though.

We thought it was hilarious, especially because (for whatever reason) you couldn’t edit or delete comments. Even if they realised their mistake, it is permanently on the system, unless they told an admin to specifically delete it. It’s become a bit of an inside joke, and we often reminisce about it.

It was also very pleasing when we once got an email on the topic of shoes:

*** On Behalf of Security ***
A package arrived this morning without a name/surname so it has been opened.
It appears to be a personal order for a pair of Disney branded shoes – unless this is to form part of the company dress code?
Package will be with Security over in the main building – ready for collection.

I love how security have thrown in some banter. He probably got annoyed about the amount of personal deliveries he had to sign for.

Praise For Slow Response

Sometimes, I think managers praise projects no matter if they release early, on-time or late. Yesterday, a manager posted this:

“I wanted to call out the success of the NFF Project where we fixed the broken NFF Processor Tool which was not working in live since September 2020. This fix went live successfully on May 4th, 2021.”

Fast response

Why have we left it ~8 months? Surely this deserves criticism and not praise?

Teh

I remember back in the early noughties, lolspeak became a thing which included intentionally poor grammar – so you would write “teh” instead of “the”. (There was l33tspeak too where you’d intentionally switch out letters for numbers).

I can understand making this (“teh”) typo occasionally, although most people would notice and correct it before sending. When there is a red, squiggly line under the word, then surely you are going to accept the spelling suggestion rather than ignoring it and sending the message anyway.

There is one colleague that constantly writes “teh”. I think they only correctly write “the” maybe 10% of the time. I find it infuriating.

Maybe it is a boring blog, but I just wanted to illustrate what I have to endure:

Was an email sent to her around teh requirements, I know there was teh one from Rob for the first part
works for teh other test box
I restarted teh box
I still get teh invalid URI message in error logs so it has to be something to do with that
ok so teh deprecate button
where do you set teh trusted connection to true?
at least teh doc is now up to date
Yep missed teh bit at teh end
I noticed last night that teh service was down….that’s another issue that I’m unsure of teh error message is around network so thought it might have rectified on it’s own by this morning
this is teh deployment section where teh token is incorrect
PC in teh office
is this to do with teh last bug fix?
give me a sec, just logging on again to get teh message
and can’t link teh user
i get teh warning banner
is it a case of changing teh ID code of the user?
From teh list of entries i provided above is any valid entries?
Do we all have visibility of teh top 25?
Nope didn’t enter teh wrong pin
Always happens when I leave teh office
I can see teh docs on teh server
Currently our test system doesn’t fully bring across teh docs
hey guys don’t forgat that teh meeting is now
Is there some comms around teh powercut
teh watermark flashed up…doesn’t seem right
I would imagine it shows in teh preview

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

[Yesterday 5:42 PM] Andrew
yesterday you checked in your code into the Main branch

[Yesterday 5:42 PM] Andrew
did you face any build errors

[Yesterday 5:43 PM] Me
No. It wouldn't have checked in otherwise. What's the problem you're having?

[Yesterday 5:43 PM] Andrew
okay..because we are getting some build errors

[Yesterday 5:44 PM] Andrew
just wanted to ask you

[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>

[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.

Slack Analytics #2: September 2020

In Slack Analytics, I stated:

I have sent 1,700 messages for the entire year.

I was interested to see my output this month. I have been sending a lot of messages to my Apprentice, I’ve been engaging in conversations with managers and testers to discuss many of my bug fixes. Some new Apprentices joined and I have also been helping them. Also, since I don’t get to physically talk much, my Slack usage has gone up.

1,803 messages over 26 days.

In Slack Analytics, I also mentioned the highest number of messages sent by someone was “3,500 across the 18 days she was in the office”.

Again, she still leads the monthly charts, but this time has 3,709 over 21 days, so it’s basically stayed the same.

Now this is interesting. How can you make everyone work at home, yet her message count hasn’t increased that much? I was expecting to see several people have counts that eclipse this figure.

Slack only allows you to see Last 30 Days, or All Time, so I don’t think I can get access to see the change pre and post lockdown. You would imagine taking away face-to-face communication will increase everyone’s usage.

I guess there are two ways to actually slack-off work. Using Slack to send banter messages to your colleagues, or just not working. So message counts could go up because more people can get away with not actually working, or it can go down because they really are slacking-off work.

The new Apprentices have been pretty quiet so far, and I would have thought they would be constantly messaging people since they wouldn’t have a clue that was going on. There’s a developer that is really quiet when we were in the office and he never seems to publicly post anything on Slack. I tend to forget he exists.

Developer	Days active	Message Count
Apprentice A	22	286
Apprentice B	21	525
Quiet Developer	23	429

Slack Analytics

Could Not Find The File

I’ve no idea what the use case was, but someone wanted to use a really old test system, but when they tried to install it, they got an error message “Could not find the file Client_5.14.Zip”

After asking for help, he was told to copy the client patch from a back-up server, and place it on the Patch Server. Then when he tries installing the software, the version will now be found on the Patch Server.

He then claimed he had just done that but was getting the same error.

Now, logic says that he has done that wrong. How can you place a file in the correct place but the error still says it cannot find it. So either:

He has placed the file on the wrong server
He has placed the wrong file on the right server
He has the correct file on the right server, but it’s the wrong filename or folder location.
Some other combinations, but you get the idea.

So I remote onto the server and look at the folder. Order by date. There’s a folder created today called “5.14”.

So it’s a folder not a zip file.
It has the wrong name. It should be “Client_5.14” not “5.14”
It has the wrong file contents in the folder.

No idea where he got the files from, or why he thought that would work.

O365 Integration

“Is it possible to get a few of us together to look at what areas of our software would be hit by Office 365? Another team is testing the integration and needs our assistance on the affected areas.”
Becky

In our software, we already integrate with Microsoft Word, but it relies on it being installed on that user’s computer. This request from Becky seemed like a random request, and there’s definitely a lot more information she needs to provide here.

So I asked “Have there been changes to our software to handle this? I don’t really get what this means. Instead of loading the locally-installed Word, is it going to launch a browser with Word in it? Does this include other aspects like Outlook, Excel etc”.

There’s loads of features of Office 365, do they want Outlook, Teams, Excel, Powerpoint or more to work? It simply isn’t going to work without us adding compatibility for it. Interacting with a Web Application (Word running inside a browser like Microsoft Edge) is completely different to interacting with a Desktop Application (Word running as a standalone software). The former will need to call an API/Web-Service, the latter is interacting with DLL files on the computer.

It turns out it was just the desktop Word application you can install via your O365 subscription. So it wasn’t really anything to do with O365 really. I found out because she eventually forwarded me an email. It had literally everything someone would need to answer her original question, it’s just that she didn’t bother sharing it.

Additionally, the other team already had a list of affected areas, and what she really wanted to know if there were any other aspects they didn’t consider.

So why did she ask such a vague question, and why suggest we would be doing the analysis from scratch?

What a waste of time. Absolutely infuriating. How many blogs am I writing about her poor communication?

What happened to Project X?

A manager sends me a message asking if I knew if a “Project X Enhancement” project was still in development (where the original Project X was something I worked on a couple of years ago).

I told her I haven’t heard anything about this Enhancement project, but I did work on the original.

She then asks me if I could estimate how long the project would take.

I don’t even know what’s happening anymore. I was under the impression that her role was to basically manage project planning…

How does she not know if the project is still in development?
How does she not know who was working on the project in the first place?

Surely she has enough experience to know that it’s impossible for someone to estimate a project when they literally know nothing about the requirements. Why would she trust my estimates? Surely it’s more beneficial to actually ask the people involved, and, if those people really are unaccounted for, then we’d better find them. Have we really lost contact with a team?

What is going on? How can we be in this situation?

Mini Musing #7: Time Typo

This typo made me chuckle.

A manager was trying to arrange a very urgent meeting and he wrote:

“I will book a meeting in for 1360pm, please attend”
Manager

Who changed the config?

Last week, a tester, Paul posted a message asking if they could change the configuration on one of the test environments. They were switching the locale from England to Scotland.

A tester, Becky then makes a fuss saying “We can’t change England to Scotland”.

Paul replies “Too late! I have now finished my testing, shall I change it back to England?”

Becky replies “No that’s fine…..I needed to understand what you were testing but if you’ve already done it then there’s nothing else to do.”

One week later:

Becky: “Is there a reason why the test environment is set to Scotland? This was previously set to England”.

Erm, yeah. You told them not to change it, but they already had. Then you told them not to change it back, so it’s still set to Scotland.