The Becky Special

Becky has worked at the company for several years as a Senior Software Tester. She occasionally does stupid things so I’ve written a few blogs about her. To be honest, she isn’t that bad when it comes to manual testing, but she isn’t technical at all; which then leads to funny mishaps.

I think she does try hard to get involved, but often has a hard time grasping even simple concepts. She seems to forget things too. There’s a few occasions where she has asked a question and stated “I’ve never come across this before”. Yet, if I search Slack, I can find the last time she asked it 3-6 months ago.

Here’s a collection of smaller stories that weren’t interesting for a full-length blog.

Interruptions

One thing that Becky likes doing is acting like she agrees with people. She often does it in an incredibly rude way.

For example, Mick was giving a detailed explanation, and while he was talking, Becky was like “yeah… yeah… yeah, yeah… yeah”. What made it even more funny is when Mick finally finished, she went “ooooh” as if she was surprised.

On a casual/non-work chat, James was informing the team on Best By vs Use By dates shown on food.

James: “Best before means..“

Becky (loudly): “Yeah! Yeah!“

Then, because James got interrupted, someone else diverted the conversation. I knew roughly what he was going to say, but other people on the call may not have, and could have found it really interesting.

I get really frustrated when I am trying to explain how to recreate a bug, or the impact of it – so she really needs to understand in order to do her job – and she is talking over me with her “yeah, yeah, yeahs”. I don’t believe she can take the information in when she is constantly saying “yeah” while you are still talking.

Profiler

Becky found a client-side issue and I was trying to investigate the code to try to understand what was happening. After a while, Becky comes up with an idea:

Becky: “shall we use the profiler?“

Me: “what sort of profiler?“

Becky: “oh, I dunno! I was thinking SQL Profiler“

Me: “It’s nothing to do with SQL“

Becky: “ah right, yeah“

I was really perplexed when she suggested using a profiler. I thought she was going to suggest something amazing like an advanced debugging tool, but no, she was just saying some words and hoping for the best.

Wrong Server

“Some help if possible…I cannot connect to the Application server within SQL Management Studio, but I can remote to it with no problem. I can however connect to the Database Server using my windows login through SQL Management Studio. Does the App server require admin credentials? TIA”
Becky

No, it doesn’t need special credentials, the problem is that Application servers don’t contain databases. A Database Server can be connected through SQL Management because it has databases. It’s in the name, really.

Any server can be connected using Remote Desktop Connection. SQL Management Studio requires Databases.

Criticising Becky

I’ve had a few calls with different colleagues recently, and instead of giving me a standard greeting and then start discussing the topic at hand…they start the conversation with a rant about Becky.

They have been helping her prior to my call. Their statements have been similar to “god, she is such hard work”, and “I have repeatedly told her what to do, but she didn’t understand – so I ended up doing it myself.”

There was one exact quote I wrote down. I thought it was hilarious.

“It’s difficult to come to terms with how useless she really is”

The Fabulous Holiday

Becky: “did you enjoy your holiday yesterday?“

Alison: “Actually, it was sick leave“

Becky: “Fabulous“

I was convinced that Becky didn’t listen to her response.

Are You Aware?

Becky added me to a group chat with a few people. She asked

“Are you aware of this issue?”

There was no previous context, and the chat didn’t have a title, so all I had to go on was her question.

I respond with a “shrug” emoji because I have literally no idea what she is referring to. After a few minutes, she hadn’t responded, so I thought I’d make it clear just in case she didn’t come to the realisation that she hadn’t sent a bug number or description. So I said

“I assume you are referring to a recent meeting you assume I was in, or have added me to a group conversation and assumed I can see the previous chat history”

So she responds

“Sorry, I thought you were aware”

I facepalm, then headbutt the desk.

Box Ticking

When we have a version of our software to release, the “patches” get stored on a server. However, the server was full which was preventing the new release from being created. This was scheduled to be signed off that evening, ready to be pushed to production tomorrow. We have a tool that can view the list of patches, and you can easily delete old versions you don’t care about. Just tick the checkboxes and click the “deprecate” button.

A few hours after I was aware of the issue, a Manager requested help. We point out that someone just needs to tick some boxes and click a button. He then posts an angry response.

“If all that needs to happen is ticking a box and clicking “deprecate”, I’m really struggling to understand why we’ve been totally blocked since this morning? 7 hours of time was absolutely wasted. Now I have to go and somehow explain this to the Senior Management why we are not signing off tomorrow!?
Angry Manager

I see this as a rhetorical statement, because obviously, he is really angry. However, Becky chimes in with:

“you have to make sure you tick the correct boxes.”
Becky

I was in tears. Absolute hilarity.

Major Incident With Comms

that awkward moment when there is a Major Incident, but there is also an Major Incident with the Comms system

When there is a Major Incident with our software, we send out emails to the affected customers. However, our Mailing provider, Mail Chimp had blocked our account without warning – apparently we were now violating their terms of service.

Since we couldn’t send out these emails regarding a Major Incident, we then declared a Major Incident.

Department Update – Interview With Colin

We had a department update where the Head of Development, Head of Programme Management and other senior managers were doing presentations on aspects that are happening in the department.

I was well shocked when the Head of Development said he had a special guest, and the next section is Interview With Colin. He was being interviewed about the performance updates and the important bug fixes his team was doing.

The thing is, his team has one of the best developers, David, and David had done ~90% of the work. Colin’s work was minimal and the work he had done didn’t work at all, until other developers had helped him.

Yet there he was, taking the credit for the work by doing this important-looking interview. The annoying thing is, when the Head of Development asked if he wanted to give any “shout-outs” he named several people, but didn’t name David.

There was even one improvement that was hyped up, but that was the first time I had heard about it. So I asked David when that was implemented. He said it was done by a different team, but Colin was basically claiming credit for leading it.

I don’t know how Colin has wormed his way to such status, but he seems to be held in high-regard by management.

Regrettably Paused

About a year ago, there was one employee that posted an angry rant about the lack of communication between managers and development staff when big changes were coming. The managers actually responded positively and said they will work on it in future. Well, it’s happened again.

It seems she was working in a subteam on a project, and her subteam was never told their project was on-hold. She heard the rumours/news from someone else, and posted this rant before the managers fully declared it to the department:

If a project is “regrettably paused” or abandoned in future, please would you consider announcing this news in the form of a department-wide meeting, inviting all those who were involved with it?
This gives people the opportunity to ask questions or make comments, much like you would if a doctor was giving you bad news.
Developer on a cancelled project

We have had a tendency to cancel projects, big or small over the last year. Some have involved my work where I had finished development – and it only needed to be signed off by Testing.

Another manager made an unrelated post about them sorting out the project plans and bug fixes. They said there were “300 pieces of work in various stages of the software delivery lifecycle. We’ve decided to continue 189 items, reject 35, and move 76 back to the Backlog for further review.” I don’t know the details of these changes, but I really hope they haven’t cancelled loads of inflight work. It’s just demoralising to have your work cancelled, and a waste of time when it wouldn’t be much work to complete it and get the new features out to users.

Maybe there’s nothing you can do about it. If managers insist we want to follow a new process, shuffle the teams about, then the current work basically needs to be abandoned otherwise the new teams cannot form.

Working On The Wrong Project

This post, How do I tell my boss I’ve accidentally been working halftime on the wrong project for the past year?, appeared on Stack Exchanges Hot Network Questions, and it is an interesting story. Is it true though? It’s definitely hard to believe.

Even though the process and management where I work is a bit slack sometimes, I just can’t imagine this scenario could possibly happen. There’s too many failures that have to happen for it to get to that stage.

A tester starts a new remote-based job and is assigned to 2 projects. 11 months later, he realises that he was only supposed to be assigned to 1 project, and was wrongly invited to the initial meeting because he shares the same name as another staff member.

When he has one-to-one meetings with his manager, he has somehow talked about work in a way that the manager didn’t realise he was working on the wrong project.

He eventually meets his team in person, and it seems some people knew the other staff member with the same name, but not enough to realise this person wasn’t the same.

I have no idea how this can actually happen.

There’s definitely going to be situations when you realise two people have the same name in your company, and especially if it is you that shares the same name. Someone emailing you by mistake; receiving an email from the other person; seeing a post on whatever chat app they use eg Slack/Teams.

Surely you have daily stand-up meetings where you talk to your team. Someone would surely realise you aren’t the person they expect, unless they all accepted it was a different person, but then they wouldn’t act like you were the other person when you physically met up.

If they really did believe it was their original colleague on the project, and there were no meetings, surely one of the team members would have communicated to the other person to ask them how they are getting on.

If the organisation only assigned a Tester to 1 project, surely there would be a point where you say you were too busy with “the other project” and would be challenged. They must be assigned to a couple of projects as standard, but then that means this person should have been assigned to a third project. It makes me wonder what the other guy was doing. The original poster says they were “focusing on other work”. Probably chilling for a year then 😀

If you have to log your time, surely a manager would realise something isn’t right when they look at the overall figures, or just your own..

If this Tester was comfortable doing both these projects, doesn’t that indicate Testers are actually underutilised and are only working at 50% capacity? I do think Testers could easily get assigned more work but they always seem to claim they are really busy.

It’s a mystery.

Communication Breakdown – Reports

All our server calls are logged in a monitoring database along with their execution time. We generate reports in order to spot any negative trends and identify where we could make efficiencies. Additionally, we need the server calls to be under 2 seconds to meet our contractual obligations.

Ryan got told to update the performance monitoring because some of the calls had generic names like “Add” and no one knew which server call it actually was because there were more than one feature with the same name. After his changes, all the logged server calls have more verbose names to easily identify where the code is e.g. “Configuration.Users.Add”. However, no one told the people who generate the reports that they need to modify their report-generating program to take into account the new format.

So when the new update went live, the reports were broken because they are searching for the wrong method names.

There was a “Major Incident” call with managers and support staff who all had no idea what was going on. I invited Ryan to the call to explain the change. Ryan pointed out “this should be in the release notes”. However, when they checked, all they stated was “Performance Monitoring should be more traceable” which is not only vague but doesn’t highlight an action for a team to take.

There should have been some explicit communication between the teams, and the improvement agreed upon. It sounds like the feature was requested, but the team hadn’t known a developer was working on it and would have it ready for the upcoming release. Additionally, if there was some communication when the development started, maybe there were other problems that could have been fixed alongside this change for increased benefit.

Requesting Help – But Not Providing Enough Info

Becky is a Software Tester with maybe 15 years testing experience, so you think she’d know what she is doing.

When I was a Tester, I quickly learned what the developers wanted in order to help you. The Message and Stack Trace is mandatory if the software crashed, but it’s always great if you can explain what you were trying to do to “set the scene”:

What you expected to happen,
and what actually happened.

Then, if possible, state specific steps to consistently recreate the issue. This is what Developers need to fix a bug, but the same information is great if you want help after failing to configure a server/feature etc.

In this situation, Becky had what sounded like a straight-forward task, and under normal circumstances, you could just log in to the software, fill in a few fields and click save.

She posts on Slack for help, and states she thought this task would be simple but it’s “not the case”. Then says with “Alan’s help, I’ve changed a config file”, and she was trying to use a configuration program but was “unable to connect”.

I’m reading her message and thinking “why has she changed this config file?”, and “what has the connection error got to do with anything else she said in the message?”. She should be able to do all this using our software.

So I message Alan to translate what she said. He did explain it wasn’t that simple, and so they were doing this configuration an alternative way. He said the current problem was just connecting to the server, and he had told her to log a ticket with the Networks team. He said after that, he would carry on helping her.

So I reply to her message on Slack, stating that Alan is still helping her.

She then says that she “knows there is knowledge within the team and didn’t want to take up any more of Alan’s time”.

I thought she was just wasting other people’s time by trying to get other people unnecessarily involved. Alan had helped until this blocking issue occurred; which Becky needed to get the Network’s team to sort out. There’s no point wasting other people’s time.

Since I had already invested some time into it, I decided to ask her some questions. I wanted to know the IP address of the server she was having trouble with, the IP address of the system she was initially configuring, and a database ID so I could actually see if she had the data in the correct tables.

She only answered 1 of my questions, and her response was a slight rephrasing of the thing I questioned. So she wants help, but won’t give me the info in order to actually help. At no point did she say that Alan had instructed her to log a ticket, so she wasn’t even following what Alan told her.

I find that there are a lot of Software Testers that fail to give you enough information to do your job. Somehow they think you can magically work out what they intended to do, and work out what the problem is with barely any information.

Name and Shame Emails

Don’t you hate it when you get an email stating that you haven’t followed a process correctly, but then everyone else that has also made the same mistake is listed in the “To” field of the email. So it’s basically “naming and shaming” everyone.

One particularly patronising work email I have received recently is the one where you haven’t submitted your timesheet. There’s massive screenshots of the website with red circles and arrows pointing at each button you need to click in order to submit it.

It’s so dumb because it only makes sense if you have NEVER submitted a timesheet: If you have submitted several weeks worth, then missed 1 week, why do you need step-by-step instructions of which buttons to click? You know what to do, all the email needs to say is that you have missed a week, and it should state the date that you missed.

However, out of the 3 times I have received such a patronising email, there was actually only 1 time where it was actually accurate. The other 2 occasions, I checked the timesheet and everything was showing as submitted. I can only assume what they did was prepare the email a few days prior to sending it. Then in the meantime, I had gone and filled it in. Either that, or maybe it was a bug in the software.

If you are basically going to criticise someone, at least you need to make sure it is accurate. Then it’s advisable not to make it known to everyone by sending mass mails.

On a related note, I received the following email today:

As you may be aware, all colleagues are required to complete the Data Security training annually.
Our reports show that your training is still outstanding.
The training needs to be completed by Friday 30 April at the very latest. A status report will be sent to the Directors on Wednesday 28 April.

I don’t recall seeing any previous email about it. Yes, it is supposed to be an annual thing, but surely I’m not supposed to create my own reminder – where is the autogenerated reminder? When I went to do the training, it was actually 1 year and 3 months since I did it last. So in my opinion, that’s their mistake but now I am receiving an email that tries to make me feel like it’s my fault. With only 8 working days to complete it, surely it’s possible there are some colleagues on annual leave during this time, in which case I’d imagine they will then have the Directors on their back.

Ironically, part of the training involved General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One of the examples of a failure was about sending emails with all the recipients in the “To” or “CC” field, rather than the “BCC”. It’s probably really relevant when sending external emails, rather than the internal email I received about the timesheet. Still, it made me smile, and I think the general principle applies that you shouldn’t receive unnecessary information about people.

Haven’t done a weeks work

I’m currently finishing off a project where we have been assigned a new Project Manager. She hasn’t made a great impression so far.

The Testers haven’t been available over the week, but personally, I did complete the development on 3 items that I’d estimated to be 8 days work, so really that’s 1.5 working weeks of work. So in my mind I was ahead of schedule by half a week.

The Testing hadn’t been done, so we hadn’t fully completed the items, so technically, we get 0 points there. However, I was ahead from my side.

Then in our project meeting (which the Testers also couldn’t attend), the Project Manager stated that she was very disappointed because “we haven’t done a week’s worth of work”.

I told the Testers what she said and they were outraged because they felt “it wasn’t her place to comment”.

A few days later, she sends me a message like:

“could you please quickly pop intot eh knban BOARD AND MAKE SURE YOU HAV PU SEOM NUMBER OF DAYS AGAINST EACH OF YOUT ITEM SO I CAN SEE HOW LONG SOMETHING TOOK ETC”
Project Manager

Did she type that without looking at the screen? So bizarre.

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