Angry Complaints

On our stand-up call, we were joined by Lyndsay from the UI Controls Team. Vincent mentions that we will require some extra controls for the work he was doing and Lyndsay responded angrily “I just checked the Slack channel and no one has requested this, how do you expect them to do the work if you haven’t asked?”. Chill out, it has just come to our attention.

After the stand-up Vincent goes in the Slack channel and posts. A developer from the UI Controls Team responds negatively. He angrily stated that its not his team’s responsibility to do all the work, and maybe Vincent should do it. Lyndsay liked his response. It completely looked like Vincent had been set up.

A few days later, our Product Owner suggests we should work in a stricter Sprint approach, so we end the two week period with an end-of-sprint demo. At the end of the call, Lyndsay starts complaining that no one has done a demo or even announced one. She then says when the Development Manager comes back from holiday in a few days time, he won’t be happy.

I’m wondering how Lyndsay expects us to take her seriously when the Product Owner had only just announced the intention to create a demo, then she starts kicking off about the lack of demos.

I’m also wondering how things can be fine for months, then all of a sudden, Lyndsay made it feel like we are doing everything wrong. It’s like when we used to log a bug, and then a Test Manager would charge to your desk, demanding to triage it.

Slack Analytics

I recently discovered that Slack has an analytics page. We’ve been using Slack for around 1 year now, and the statistics sure were interesting.

The channel with the most posts is the team that were responsible for the adoption of using Slack. They collectively have written 74,000 posts in that one channel. That figure is seriously alarming. What about posting in other channels, or sending private messages? Damn.

Well, their highest individual posted 64,000 messages, but the average for their team was around 30,000. Their newest member of their team led the monthly charts for December with 3,500 across the 18 days she was in the office.

I think I use Slack far too much, but I have 1,700 message for the entire year. Yet, that is half the leading December poster. My team’s channel has around 1,100 posts. So we post around 74 times less than the highest posting team. That particular team has posted 2.5 times the second place team, so they are ahead by some distance.

I do wonder how much Slack impacts productivity. I think the team that is leading the Slack charts is perceived to be very productive and innovative by the Managers. Yet perception by Managers is often different from the actual truth. I often hear their team claim they are too busy and that other teams need to help out with their backlog. Maybe if they weren’t on Slack so much, then more work would be done? I don’t see how one team can justify sending 74,000 messages across a year. That is a staggering amount.

Buzzwords

There’s a manager that constantly reels off jargon and buzzwords, then at the end of his speech, I always think “what the hell is going on?”.

I was watching a few of his video updates and wrote down a few phrases that took my interest. The first video was about “latest developments” and how these changes are going to “accelerate development” as we “integrate with teams“.

The next video asked “how do we get the backlog to illustrate we are moving in the right direction?” with a respect to “data-driven timelines”. There’s gonna be a “high level plan” which will allow us to “commence application development come Q2”. We can “tally up with the timeline” and when we “consider ourselves integration ready”, we then “help teams work with integration-ready architecture”. Finally, when we get “all bases covered”, “collectively we have a whole backlog and roadmap of work”.

Can we achieve this? Let’s hope it is clearer come Quarter Two.

Full Regression

Several months ago, a project was completed (let’s call it Project X) that must have contained the biggest impact to our software. What I mean is that the scope impacted a lot of features, and therefore to sign it off, the testers ran an insane amount of regression tests. The Project X team ended up running these tests with the help of other teams, and many hours of overtime was needed.

A release was being planned that involved more bug fixes than usual. I think one of the Test Managers had suggested that we run a full regression test to ensure the changes made by Project X hadn’t been effected. Marcus, a tester involved in Project X stated that this was an “unreasonable request, and we need to do a more focussed, targeted test”.

The next day, a Test Manager came up to Marcus and said she had asked someone to give estimates of a full regression and she had been quoted 6 weeks. She said it was absurd and wanted Marcus to confirm it. Marcus stated once more that he had already highlighted it was an unreasonable ask. He explained that she is requesting that 4 people run the tests over a two week period, when the original team had three weeks and around 20 people were involved. This is why Marcus rejected the proposal in the first place.

Another day passes, and another Test Manager announces that, after much debate – running a full regression isn’t feasible, so they will do a targeted regression.

No doubt there were one or more meetings to discuss this, when Marcus had already told them how unfeasible it was a couple of days earlier. It’s just that people with the authority to make the decisions, and the people that actually have the knowledge of how things work – are completely different people.

Gun ’em down

A tester had created loads of alerts and hadn’t disabled them. Jack sent a mass mail to rant about it, stating that any tests that can annoy others should always be cleaned up. He was doing some important testing and having alerts spam his screen was slowing him down and stressing him out.

Later, I sat next to Jack in a meeting and decided to wind him up about it.

timeinints: “Hey Jack, what are you gonna do about this testing situation? This happens a lot and we need to stop it.”

Jack: “What I’m gonna do, is march down to their office and gun them all down.”

The meeting host then points out that members the other office were on the conference call.

Well, that’s awkward. 😀

Jack

Some teams make a presentation to show what they have done over the previous Sprint (usually 2 week period). One team hadn’t achieved what they had planned, so included a table to illustrate that they were low on staff, mainly due to annual leave. So it looked something like this:

25^th November	Jack off
26^th November	Ben and Jack off
27^th November	Sally off
28^th November	Ben at a conference

Jack off!

The team was jacking off for a few days so they weren’t very productive.

Manager Step Down

Our team was initially managed by Jane. A few weeks into the project, Jane explained to a colleague that she was leaving the team. Only when she noticed I was eavesdropping did she then tell us that I probably need to listen too. She told us which team she was moving to but she didn’t even give a date when this would happen. I thought it was bizarre that she announces it so casually rather than having a formal meeting.

The next day, when we were on a conference call with some remote workers, they were waiting for her to join and didn’t want to start the meeting without her. Jane did join on request, but she still didn’t tell them she wasn’t in charge, or even had left the team.

Afterwards, a team member in our office was outraged about it, because he wasn’t aware. She claimed it wasn’t her responsibility to tell people; the responsibility should fall with the new manager, Adam.

I’m thinking it totally is her responsibility. Adam shouldn’t just state he is in charge now – it should be announced by Jane, who then explains we need to listen to the new guy. It wouldn’t be her responsibility to hand over if she had been fired; only then you would expect the new guy to announce he is in charge, or someone further up the hierarchy to announce and introduce the new manager.

The funny thing is, months later, Adam suddenly leaves the business. His replacement started joining the stand-ups but didn’t speak for a few days, didn’t even introduce himself. When he finally introduced himself on the fourth day, he then had the awkward task of telling us Adam’s last day is today and will leave after he completes his handover.

Slack inconsistencies

Recently, we started using Slack due to someone waxing lyrical about how all the cool tech companies are using it. Here are my top things I hate about how my colleagues use Slack:

1. Inconsistent use of threads

When we used Microsoft Teams, people were mocked when they posted a brand new message instead of replying to the previous one. However, even though it’s the same people using it, replying to a message seems to be uncool in Slack, and it seems encouraged to post a brand new message even though you are referring to a previous post. This causes people to act all irrationally, because then they get confused if they should either simply post, @ the person, reply and repost etc.

When you get two questions in a short space of time, people have no choice but to “create a thread”. This gets confusing because part of the conversation then appears as replies, but the start of the conversation were separate messages. Sometimes people still won’t start a thread, then just keep @’ing them instead.

When you want to find previous conversations, you end up having to scroll through all that crap which may have been a conversation between 2 people and no one else cared. If it was a thread, it would just be collapsed into one message.

There is also a Thread section which shows you threads you are involved in, but then they are incomplete because people’s inconsistent use of threads, so that feature is frustratingly useless.

2. Going off on a tangent of memes

People seem to see Slack as a casual way of communicating. Maybe because it has the name “Slack” which doesn’t sound as corporate as Teams or Skype. The level of professionalism dips to the point that people are just replying with a GIF, then someone else replies with another GIF. Maybe the GIF had some relevance, but the reply would probably just be a GIF that the person liked. Maybe they didn’t understand why the first GIF was chosen and thought it was a great opportunity to reply with a cute cat. Sometimes you have gone so far off on a tangent, you don’t even know what triggered a response

3. Replying to yourself multiple times like its some kind of instant messenger client and you think you need a second by second update about what you are doing

People seem to view Slack as an Instant Messaging client, whereas with Teams they viewed it as a Message Board. People tended to write longer messages on Teams, and if they needed to post some additional information, they tended to edit the original post.

Since Slack is perceived as Instant Messaging, people often post quick messages one after another, so it’s like:

Tim: “Can you give me access to this repository”

Mark: “Hang on”

Mark: “You should have access now”

Mark: <thumbs up emoji>

Tim: I have access now

Tim: thanks mate

4. replying to a thread but also posting it to the channel even though no one cares

This is very much like point 1, but I think it deserves a special mention. Sometimes a thread has formed and may have several replies in it. I am happy, several people are using the software as it is designed. Then boom! Someone comes in with a basic comment like “I agree with this” and then they tick the box to repost it to the channel. It’s like they think their opinion is so important, they have to make sure everyone sees it.

5. Too many channels.

We have so many channels, many teams have a private channel just for them, and a separaate channel for outsiders to ask questions. Some teams even have a third channel where only bots post the main content. They link it up with GitHub so that any Pull Request or Issues are just reposted to the channel. I guess they have disabled their email alerts and prefer to get the messages in Slack. Often, people go into the channel then say “@here ^” to cause an alert to everyone to check it. Surely the Slack channel was created to avoid the email alerts, then people are replacing them with a Slack alert.

6. people using @channel @here as it if it is important

That brings me onto the next point, people using @channel and @here tags. Normal messages give you an unread notification, @ tags give you a desktop alert like it’s important.

@everyone notifies every person in the #general channel

@here notifies only the active members of a channel

@channel notifies all members of a channel, active or not

If you look at Slack’s official documentation https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/202009646-Notify-a-channel-or-workspace, they say “We suggest using @here, @channel, and @everyone sparingly.”

An example when to use them:

@everyone – Alert everyone in the company about the emergency evacuation drill.

@here – You’re locked out of the office and need help from someone already at work.

@channel – Update a project team’s channel about a last-minute change in deadlines.

But people use them daily. It’s like “@channel can you tell me where I can find the specification”, “@here can you tell me who knows most about automated testing?”. I end up “muting” most channels to prevent these alerts from showing. It is never that important.

7. You can only have 15 participants on a conference call.

Most teams only contain several members, so team calls are usually fine. Recently, teams have been doing demos, or individuals have been attempting to share their knowledge via a live tutorial; and we have hit the limit. Even when people know there’s gonna be more than 15 participants, they will still host the call on Slack. Why? Because Slack is what the cool kids use. What you gonna do? Post messages in Slack asking the presenter to record it? Slack doesn’t have that feature. Here’s a GIF of a child crying.