Our Team Lead had been hyping up how important it is to improve the statistics of our codebase. So we have a report that runs and gives you metrics about duplicated code, “code smells”, possible bugs, test coverage etc.

Colin volunteered to lead on this. I know that he is just trying to impress our manager to try and worm his way into another undeserved promotion. The thing is, he isn’t even thinking about what he is doing.

There’s been 2 meetings per week, and it’s been going on for 3 months. I wanted to know what was going on because we haven’t heard any outcome from the meetings, and the statistics haven’t improved either.

Intervening

I asked one of the attendees if they had discussed a particular rule that was flagged by the report, and told him that if we suppress the rule, it will improve the metrics by 300 or so. He told me to come to the meetings.

So I join the meeting, and ask them to investigate the possibility of suppressing this rule and people seem to think it is a great idea. No one had any other new ideas, so then Colin said we would continue going through the report.

I asked him to explain the process since it was my first meeting. He said there are different severities like low, medium, high, critical, and managers only care about the two highest categories. So he was going through each rule and commenting on them saying they can be changed to Low, or that we need to fix them.

So we start looking at each rule violation, and there’s about 8 people on the call; mainly developers but a few interested testers, and 2 managers. I say “interested” because they have turned up to the call, but when Colin asks people to discuss it, no one can make a decision. Colin kept on trying to describe what the code was doing but made so many mistakes, I had to correct him several times.

I was basically taking over, but kept on asking for other people’s opinions, but people seemed pretty indifferent. The call had gone on for nearly an hour and a developer hadn’t said a word, so Colin accused him of being asleep. The developer said he was awake, but then continued to stay in silence for the rest of the call.

I was told there was another meeting in a few days time, and it would be more technical, so I agreed to join.

The Great Realisation

That meeting was basically the same people, but excluding the managers. Colin continued going through each rule violation again. The conversation that followed roughly went like this:

Me: “Hang on, this is taking forever. We are seeing the same type of rule violation and you have gone through about 15 of them now.”

Colin: “Yeah, there are loads”.

Me: “This seems like it is gonna take all year. How many violations of this particular rule are there?”

Colin: “4000”.

Me: “Hang on, let me get this right. You are going through each of the 4000 violations, analysing the code, and trying to decide if you should mark it as Low severity or not?”

Colin: “Yep”

Me: “Don’t you think it is stupid?”

Colin: “That’s what managers want us to do”

Me: “No, the managers want you to decide how important the rules are, not how important each particular violation is. If they were aware there’s 4000 of the same rule, I’m sure they wouldn’t want you to do this. Why don’t we just look at the rules? How many rules are there that are being flagged as High or Critical”

Colin: “5”

Me: “So you have had about 12 meetings to discuss 5 rules, and you haven’t even gone through 1?”

Colin: “Yeah”.

Absolute waste of time. Just think, if there’s only 6 people and you paid them £12 an hour, and had 24, 1 hour-long meetings that they attended – that’s a cost of £1,728. But then sometimes there would be more people attending, and you had the expensive managers too. What did they achieve until I came along? Nothing. No one questioned it.

The thing is, we are concentrating on the wrong thing. There’s plenty of bugs to fix which bring value to the users. Why are we wasting time tweaking things that don’t need to be changed? The crazy thing is, we are spending all this time talking about doing it, and it isn’t being done.

The Efficient Team

In the next meeting. I told the manager our new approach, and also raised some of my concerns with how much importance we are placing on this. She didn’t care about my concerns so that got ignored. What she did say was “you guys are becoming an efficient team”.

Is that even serious? Months of wasted time. The words sound sarcastic to me, but I think she was being serious; the tone sounded sincere.

So in conclusion: Colin was just trying to impress the managers by taking the lead, and so was everyone else really; they were on the call, but they really had no passion for what we were doing.