I occasionally meet up with my old university mates. One friend works for a contracting company. He is a really good developer on a juicy £100k wage which is crazy, and it shows how much money companies waste on software on short contracts. Often they may only have small, permanent development teams, then hire some temporary staff for extra capacity, or they might just fully outsource their software requests entirely.
Since he works on short contracts, often 3-6 months, (sometimes up to a year), he has experience seeing how many companies operate.
I love having discussions with him because he is incredibly knowledgeable and always keeps up with the latest jargon. He knows all the Cloud and Web-development jargon, popular software tools, and Agile process.
He came out with this statement:
“It’s reassuring that you get to work with different companies doing different things, but they are all terrible. You are often asked to help – not because it’s going well; but because it’s going wrong”
What he was saying is that companies have different philosophies when it comes to software. It could be Cloud only, on-prem only, strict Agile development, different levels of automation etc, but whatever they do, it doesn’t quite work, and they will make baffling decisions.
So when I write about the baffling decisions where I work, it’s just that we are failing in a different way to other companies.
I was getting a 503 error when trying to use Git. After searching for internet for solutions, I came across this “unicorns have taken over Error – 503“. I wondered what that was all about? Was it one of those stupid error pages some companies do as a joke?
As a developer, you need to “commit” your work into source control. When you do this, you need to provide a message that describes the change. A bug fix or enhancement can consist of a few commits. When you use a source control like Git, you can even “rewrite” the “history” by using squash/rebase commands.
When I am writing code for my job, I often put a bit of thought into the wording to make it clear and professional. If it is for a personal side-project, I sometimes write meaningful messages, but sometimes I may group together multiple fixes, then come up with something generic like “Bug fixes”, or might commit more experimental work-in-progress under a name like “attempt” or “x feature part 1”.
It’s quite frustrating though to see colleagues write generic messages like “bug fix” which doesn’t describe what it is fixing, or how it is fixing it. Seeing messages littered with spelling mistakes is also annoying and unprofessional.
Examples include:
“EventNotificationBugFix After Resolving James’ Comment”
“bug resolved”
“Dev test changes from tester” (literally what does that mean?)
Updated the findCorrectCodeSp to findCurrectCode.
Taken off completly the fix Amanda done for the fix for 25477 and fixed. Included the fix for 8017 as well
Fix for SQLCrop issues (should be SQL Cop, our Code Analysis)
Fioxed further typos (ironically creating more typos when fixing typos)
fixed the failed unit testes (testes rather than tests. Brilliant)
“Post Christ’ comments re coding standards” (it’s the second coming of Christ to teach us coding standards! They meant to write Chris.)
There was a guy who worked in our short-lived Scotland office who sounded like an absolute nutcase and I have never seen someone not take their job seriously like this:
instructions unclear, got dick stuck in tfs
what a waste of eyes
but fuck wasps
be nice to bees
what if there were landmines in dinosaur times
A colleague recently showed me this website https://whatthecommit.com/. I don’t know if they are based on real messages, but it shows you a new message every time you refresh. Most are pretty basic along the lines of “does this work”, but there’s some more outlandish ones if you persevere and refresh many times.
One of my team members recently submitted a change that was labelled “Crash when cancelling out of the dialog”. That describes the bug that he fixed, rather than what he fixed. Another team member provided the following good advice:
The change looks good, but your commit message isn’t describing the change. Could you just reword it so that it completes the sentence “When applied, this commit will…” please. Another way of looking at it is that every commit should read like an instruction in a to-do list. I’d use something like “Return empty collection if user cancels out of the dialog”.
One of our Principal Developers loves linking people to this guide https://cbea.ms/git-commit/. One interesting idea is to “Use the imperative mood in the subject line”, whereas most people would write in the past tense.
Having a clear history of file changes helps you when it comes to finding which change caused an issue, and also gives you a better understanding why it changed.
Today, I saw some code that looked like the classic “I can’t recreate this bug, so I’ll write some code to log extra information, and I’ll hope this somehow helps me diagnose the issue”.
They had a list of data, and the ID in this list should be unique, but it was in there twice due to a bug. So it would look like something like this (ID =1 is in there twice):
private List<Code> _codes = new List<Code>()
{
new Code
{
IsSelectable = true,
ID = 1
},
new Code
{
IsSelectable = true,
ID = 1
},
new Code
{
IsSelectable = false,
ID = 2
},
new Code
{
IsSelectable = true,
ID = 3
}
};
Then their method contained this code to validate the data:
The Single will throw an exception due to there being more than one matching element (Single will succeed when there is a Single match). In the catch block, they then convert the code list to a dictionary and will log this in the error database. However, a dictionary requires the keys in the dictionary to be unique. Since there’s duplicate IDs, this will throw an exception again, this time with:
“System.ArgumentException: ‘An item with the same key has already been added.'”
Error thrown in the catch block
So you get an error whilst trying to log your error. The extra information they intended to log is never logged.
I’ve seen this mistake happen a few times before, and usually you can test it by artificially creating the data condition. Then they would realise their error logging doesn’t work.
I’ve been writing a game using Unity, and I’ve just realised how rare it is to use floating point (decimal) numbers in my day job as a software developer. I remember my Computing teacher back in College stating how computers are rubbish at calculating decimal numbers, but I never really understood. Calculators work just fine. They may only have several decimal places but that is usually more decimal places than you need.
In game development, decimal numbers are frequently used for sizes and positions in a 3D space and therefore calculations with these objects involve lots of decimal maths.
After writing some logic to position my characters on the map, I tried writing a unit test. Unit testing this method could be beneficial when I add extra features later.
I wanted to compare a Vector which is composed of 3 floating point numbers. Since I already had written the logic and was happy with the character’s positioning, I just grabbed the output of the method and specified it as the expected output, but my test failed!
Expected: (-34.28, 0.00, 20.63)
But was: (-34.28, 0.00, 20.63)
I think the numbers it shows you is a text representation which involves rounding the numbers to 2 decimal places. But if you look at the actual X, one is -34.275 and the other is -34.28. So there’s a 0.005 difference. A similar problem with Z.
“Due to floating point inaccuracies, this might return false for vectors which are essentially (but not exactly) equal. Use the == operator to test two vectors for approximate equality.”
I was originally using Assert.Equals(expected, actual) so I switched to Assert.True(expected == actual) but it still wasn’t working.
I looked at the Unity source code and they are providing their own == operator for vectors that does some “square magnitude” calculation then compares if it is less than a certain number – a margin of error.
So I did something similar and increased the number. I came up with this, using Unity’s provided square magnitude function, but wasn’t sure if it made mathematical sense: It worked for my scenarios though
Looking back at this, I probably over complicated it. I suppose I should just change the expected values to have more decimal places because it’s the rounding to 2 decimal places that will be the actual problem in this case. In other cases with more decimal points, you will encounter issues due to the way computers do handle large decimal numbers which the Unity docs are alluding to.
In other situations, you also need some leeway in your calculations. If you want to move a character to a certain position, you may find that they could be 0.1 away from their destination, then on the next frame, they move their usual distance based on their movement speed – and then overshoot it. So you end up needing to write code like “if distanceRemaining < 0.2f then stop”
So floating point numbers, especially when it comes to game development, really does add extra complications to think about.
Recently, a team was created in order to tackle major issues, often proactively. Some errors are logged without the user noticing anything, so by monitoring the logs, the team can diagnose and fix these “silent” errors. The other thing they are looking out for is performance problems. Some performance problems aren’t noticed when it’s more of a minor increase, inconsistent, or slowly gets worse over time. I would think some users don’t bother reporting slowness because it’s harder to quantify than the obvious crash.
However, one user had been seeing a recent drop in performance by not dealing with their tasks, but it had got to the point where they could no longer log in, as it took longer than 30 seconds to retrieve their tasks on login – so it timed-out (as in an error was meant to be thrown when the time to retrieve their tasks took 30 seconds).
“At the time of logging this bug, the user currently has 136,854 tasks in Tasks Management. The Program performance will start to be negatively affected after 4,000 tasks. I have extended the timeout of sql call for TasksManagement.GetUserTaskCountSummary to 60 seconds as this caused a login failure.”
Walter (Developer)
“let’s be honest, the program performance will start to be negatively affected after 1 task”
Mike (jestingly)
I think this is acceptable as a quick fix to allow the user to login again, but is it really acceptable for the login process to take more than 30 seconds? I’d imagine it would take around 40 seconds for this user.
That’s the problem with this team, they just look for quick wins, even if it isn’t the right solution long-term, and might even move the problem elsewhere.
What’s better than waiting 30 seconds? waiting 60 seconds? or threading it off to delay the loading? or Mark’s idea: no timeout.
What if the time taken still exceeds 60 seconds, assuming some other user has a large volume of data? Can you set the timeout as infinity?.
Mark
we had a customer with a very large count and it only ran for around 32/33 seconds and their counts were unusually large. We are going to send out communications for customers to keep these low by means of maintenance. The 60 seconds just allows an extra safety net if we get in this situation again. I don’t want to extend the timeout to be too long for this reason as it will unlikely (if ever) be needed to be longer than 60 seconds.
Walter
Why not a try catch / retry attempt for this? It should be a non-essential call to logging in, if it fails, you can catch, log, and show an error message. Should we not look at optimising this so that you can login quicker? Maybe run this on a background thread too?
Lee
I discussed this with Johnny and making changes to this Stored Procedure could result in worse performance for smaller datasets and advised against making changes to it. We’re going to tackle this by means of communications to sites. I thought the simplest and safest approach is just to extend the timeout slightly so that the practice does not suffer a system down as a result of it – the timeout is only breached by a second or two. Once the user logs in, they are displayed their task counts, so I think it might be deemed essential (rather than showing them a loading wheel until the data is returned). Currently, if we did this, when loading up Tasks Management it would just crash with an error.
Walter
It would still crash on logging in if it takes over 60 seconds. Why not make it non-critical to logging in?
Log in
Status bar “Loading…”
Completes – OK.
Fails – Show error and retry link.
Lee
This was the worst site on the estate and was taking roughly 32 seconds. To take over 60 seconds the task count would probably be unheard of. Each time I ran that stored procedure manually, the results were the same so I don’t think a retry is going to work here. Even by changing to make it non critical to logging in, Tasks Management will still be busted when you try to load it. The timeout is on the SQL side so that is the area we need to resolve really.
Walter
However, Johnny did advise against alternative solutions such as: 1. fine tuning the stored proc 2. adding indexes 3. Remove tasks counts completely for some types of tasks
My View:
Walter seemed to have put more thought into it than I originally thought, but I still thought he was overlooking Lee’s suggestion. Yes, it would need more work to actually work (display loading text on the Tasks Count Bar, then loading screen when launching the Tasks Management page), but it would significantly speed up logging in. If this user could log in 32 seconds quicker, then what would the average user see?
If the other parts of the log-in process also take some time, then that’s a long time they are waiting in total. If taskcounts are the bulk of the time, then we can make it super fast if we take it out. I would have thought users would expect times of 5 seconds or less (might not be possible, but that’s the scale we need to aim for). Walter is talking like users are more than happy to wait 30 seconds or more just to get to the home page. A long wait is better than not being able to log-in at all, but surely it’s generally unacceptable to be more than several seconds in total. It’s one of the reasons why users have grown more discontent over time.
When doing some testing of smaller counts, for example 10k – the results are returned in a few seconds (2-3). This organisation had around 120k Appointments Tasks across all users plus all of their other tasks which resulted in a production duration of 32 seconds. The more they manage their tasks the quicker workflow will be, that’s always been the message we’ve tried to get across.
Last year, we felt slightly aggrieved that our employer made out they would match inflation with our pay rises, but then disguised it with: a one-off profit share, pension payments, and optional benefits. Our wage only increased by 2% but inflation was currently around 7% and predicted to rise further. Better than nothing though, so can’t really complain.
With inflation being 10%, we wondered what we would get this year. Then came the communication that stated that they understand inflation, and remarked that we are still highly profitable so can cover the costs:
“Further to our communication at the end of 2022, I can now update you on our remuneration approach for 2023. We know and understand that employees are continuing to experience cost pressures and we remain committed to ensuring that the overall pay budget for this year reflects the continued external inflationary environment we are in. Whilst this has been possible due to the ongoing success of the business, it will require us to again manage our costs in 2023 carefully.”
HR Director
However, then they reminded us that they gave us:
an extra £200 one-off payment
Increased leave for parents
the option to work bank holidays and take a different day off instead.
they will give us a one-off profit share just like last year
So with them clutching at straws for things they have done, you know that means they weren’t giving us 10%. Maybe we could get 5% as a compromise then?
“The exact amount of any increase to an individual’s salary and timing will be agreed locally, as normal, and will be dependent on a number of factors including performance. I believe these measures reflect our responsibility to be aware of the external inflationary environment, our immense gratitude for your efforts over the past year and our desire to become an employer of choice.”
HR Director
What did I get?
0%
“immense gratitude for your efforts over the past year” 🤨
I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that judging performance is very subjective and often bent to fit a narrative, and I got completely screwed. So let’s get into it:
The Review
“You had an average year in 2022, working on only a couple of projects, one where you worked as an individual contributor then moved onto a pair project”
Well, that seems to imply just being on 2 projects in a year was a bad thing, but that’s not really my fault is it? Since I single-handedly delivered one project, then was in a team of 2, surely that should show I can handle responsibility and pressure?
“You were good in many technical aspects but were not able to step up to the plate as a leader in the team.”
I was in a team of 2 as a Senior Developer, and I got really good feedback from that team member. What more do you want?
“You were given an opportunity to lead on defining our interview process. I expected you to lead on this but have not shown much interest in it. Ultimately someone else led it, creating the interview pack, redefining interview questions and leading live interviews, which I think is a missed opportunity to shine.”
I blogged about this process. It was a mess, but at least I tried my best to direct it. We created an interview process for Graduate Developers from Indian universities who were using Python, but set them C# and Object-oriented questions…then asked questions on Software Testing which they also don’t do. I was pretty clear we needed to focus on the people we were targeting (Python and Web programming) and not on what the job was (C# Developer); (or even better, change the people we were targeting – but that was already decided upon). I got outvoted by the other Seniors. I felt I couldn’t lead in the interviews because I didn’t believe in the questions.
“I can see that you might not see Unit testing as a productive way forward, and the target set might not be accurate”
In recent times, managers have been demanding we achieve 80% test coverage and I have highlighted how poor many tests are that people write, and the 80% is a random target. It’s not improving the quality of code at all. Due to the fact I wrote little (but high-quality tests) I got criticised and talked about between senior management. I raised in my review that I believe managers now see my output as low quality, so I will need to repair my reputation.
I also raised that I was annoyed at the frequency of team member changes. My projects had Testers switched in and out, we changed Product Owners, Software Architect, and there was talk of more changes that didn’t happen. Colin then stated “I never raised my concerns at the time”, but I definitely did.
Some of the comments received from your colleagues:
“I think that he has been a good technical lead. His knowledge is excellent, and this has been shown in how he has been able to help me with any technical problems. He has constantly been available, has a great attendance record, and will defer annual leave for the good of the project. His code review comments are always clear, concise, and helpful. He is always available to help with Testing as well.”
“He has a good insight into what he thought was and was not possible”
“He needs to make sure that just because an issue is raised he doesn’t jump on it right away as there is a priority order for things”
“He’s reliable and just gets on with the work”
“Can be a bit quiet on calls at times but whenever I specifically call him out in calls, he would answer questions”
“At weekly meetings there wasn’t enough substance in his updates. He doesn’t come across as a leader to me or perhaps he just did not want to be at those meetings.”
I definitely got good feedback from people but then the positive ones were ignored in the discussion. I had good arguments against some of the negative points as well. I think I only picked up non-prioritised work when I had finished the work that was. What do you want me to do? Just sit there idle? I often knew it was issues related to recent work so it was obviously gonna be the highest priority, and as Team Lead, I think I can make that call myself.
I’m always annoyed when people criticise me for being quiet on calls. If enough people are saying the things I am thinking, then I don’t need to speak. If no one has raised the issue I am thinking of, then I will provide it. Then, if people specifically ask what I think, then I will say, even if I am repeating what others have said. That final feedback was about a meeting similar to a Scrum of Scrums where many teams get together. But the meeting was mainly for Colin and he rarely attended. So I had the attitude of quickly going through my points then moving on. I thought the wording was harsh – they have no idea what it is like to work with me directly.
I have no idea how they can justify giving me nothing. That’s like a 10% pay-cut with today’s economy.
Colin isn’t my manager anymore, so let’s hope my new manager will actually put things right.
This long blog documents what I have been working on for the past year. I had made lots of notes with the aim of writing a blog, in addition to taking extra notes from chat logs.
We actually estimated the project would take around 5 months, but then an extra 2 months for testing and go through our slow rollout process. It actually took closer to a year. I’d say it was a combination of:
realising the feature was more complicated than anticipated
the UX team had little knowledge of the actual user experience
managers changing or trying to change team members
We were told the project was important, yet we were only assigned 2 developers (as in myself and one other). As the project came to a close, we were being integrated into our new team, therefore other developers could help out during the final stages.
Here is a list of all the people involved over the project’s lifetime:
Name (Core team in bold)
Role
Me
Developer (Team Lead)
Daniel
Developer
Dean
Developer (Temporary)
Dennis
Developer (Temporary)
Tina
Tester
Tim
Tester
Colin
Technical Manager
Mary
Technical Manager
Olivia
Product Owner
Owen
Product Owner
Carl
Customer Representative
Adam
Architect
Andy
Architect
Grace
Safety & Legal Governance
Ulrika
UX
Ursula
UX
I’ve made the names start with a letter to represent their job title, apart from Colin because he is a recurring person in my blogs. I’ll put reminders throughout the blog so it is easy to follow.
Current Software
To protect anonymity, I need to come up with a different theme for what the software is for. Let’s say customers request various restricted items of different severity. So a request could come in for a Hunting Rifle, and the user needs to know if they have the adequate licence to possess firearms and they are deemed medically safe in a recent time-frame. Possible warnings are shown which the user can dismiss/acknowledge e.g. “licence is up for renewal in the next 3 months”, “recent purchase of other firearms”. Standard users can create “Awaiting Approval” tasks and assign them to users with authority to approve. To approve them, the authorised users open the task list, view the details, then click approve. Many tasks have either no warnings, or low-severity warnings, so users often just glance at the info and click Approve. The system then sends the approved request to a central system, then loads up the next task. There’s a couple of seconds delay due to the “digital signing”, a couple of seconds for sending, then loading up the next record. To sign loads of tasks, it’s a very slow and laborious process. It’s a major source of complaints from our users.
Unsafe/Unofficial Automation
Carl [Customer Representative] sent a link to a video where someone was demoing a commercial automated tool that autocompletes the tasks. It waits for the system to load, clicks the approve button, then repeat. So you could set it running, then walk away from your desk.
I thought it seemed ridiculously irresponsible and would cause people to be sacked if they got caught using such a tool:
A) The program is now the one authorising the tasks, not the qualified user. What’s the point needing to have qualifications if you aren’t even going to read what is on-screen? If a task was wrongly approved, then the user would be accountable.
B) if you walk away from your desk, you are leaving your PC unlocked, along with your physical Security Key.
The creator had actually put a bit of thought into it though. If there are any Warnings that require another click to dismiss/override, then the automation is paused.
The video claimed that some users have up to 500 tasks to sign after a weekend. They charge a fixed yearly fee of £295, plus 7p per customer on the system per year.
“the robot does not get bored, does not make human errors, and crucially is a lot cheaper than the user’s hourly wage”
Promotional video for the Automation tool
Probably just makes robotic errors instead!
I said we should change the names of the buttons to try and screw them since it probably uses something like that to locate the button to click. It would be quite funny to make them dish out refunds.
The existence of the automation tool shows how much the users desire a better solution.
UX User Feedback
Given the existence of such an automated tool, it is no surprise that one frequently requested feature is Batch Approval. Our UX team put together some kind of interactive prototype and invited a few users to provide feedback on two designs. The alternative design was actually produced by Mary [Technical Manager] who has no UX qualifications. I’m not sure how that came about and why UX agreed to trial her design, but the feedback was actually extremely favourable to her design.
This caused her to be quite smug and maybe caused some animosity as we will see later. The ratings out of 5 were:
(Option A) 4.3 for Mary’s design
(Option B) 2.3 for UX Team’s design
For additional comments, one user commented:
“I prefer Option A by a country mile – Option B feels even worse than the existing system!”
Another commented:
“Option B feels more clunky, less user friendly than option A. A lot of clicking involved”
One even gave a threatening response:
“Option A or you’re gonna lose me and my franchise”
Shortly, there was a write-up from a conference where the feature was announced:
“This item is one that really did steal the show – this is something that our customers have been very eager to see us implement and are very excited to learn that we are busy developing this solution.”
“Busy developing this solution” made me laugh, because at the time, all I had was a dialog box with a couple of lines of text and a button.
Proposed Change
The general idea, is that the user is presented with key details from the tasks in a data grid.
They can click checkboxes to select which tasks they want to approve.
These are added in a queue to send in the background.
The user can continue working as they are sending.
The “digital signing” has to take place on the user’s computer so a large part is done client-side.
The user has to remain logged in until the process is finished.
This project had actually been discussed for years, but because there wasn’t much of a “commercial drive” for it – we would be giving users this feature for free – it was always low priority.
Product Owner: Owen
I think the initial planning was done by a different Product Owner but then when the project fully began, we were assigned a new Product Owner, Owen, who was new to the company, but he also gave me the impression that he was new to the role…but also didn’t seem very clever in general.
Here are some quotes that happened in various meetings (mainly Sprint Planning and Refinement).
Owen: "which work item is it?"
Me: “the one right at the top"
Owen: slowly scrolls...chooses 2nd item
Me: "it's not a Must, it is a Could"
Owen saves it with Must tag
Tim [Tester]: "No, Owen, you tagged it wrong, go back"
Owen: "Which WI is this?"
saves it with the Must tag again
Then goes back into the work item and gets confused
then goes back into it again. I think he needs rebooting
Me: "you need to set the state"
Owen clicks to close
Me: "you need to set the state, go back"
Owen is confused
Me: "left hand side Owen!"
Owen hovers over the right
Me: "left hand side Owen!"
Owen moves down
Me: "leave it as it is"
Owen "Which one shall I take out?"
I'm sure he is intentionally 30 seconds behind to wind us all up
Owen changes Story Points from 3 to a 5 without any discussion.
"shall we keep it at 5?"
For another item, I was talking about how the requirement is either obsolete, or needs a completely different approach from the initial proposal.
Owen: "So how many points shall we add?"
"The system crashes when entering incorrect PIN and clicking 'OK' on error prompt"
Owen: "what was the behaviour before we fixed this?"
team: "It crashed"
We were discussing how we logged a bug a few months back but haven’t seen it occur since, so it will need some investigation to try work out what the recreation steps are.
“Assuming the bug still exists, how long will it take to fix it?”
Owen
Estimating software changes is hard, but I always think bugs are even harder to estimate. It’s only possible if there’s clear recreation steps, otherwise it is stupid to ask – we can’t fix it if we don’t know what the problem even is.
“depending on Grace’s [Safety & Legal Governance] feedback, do you know how long it would take to fix?”
Owen
Translation: can you predict what Grace would say, and given that she did say it, can you come up with an estimate for it?
I logged a bug about suggestions on how to improve a dialog. It would be up to Owen or UX to decide on the approach to fix it. Owen then asks questions along the lines of: “what do we need to do for this? do we need it?” I said it would be nice but it’s not my decision. Then he still asks “do we need it?” “can we close it?“
What’s the point asking me these questions, when I logged it with the aim of asking him to decide?
When the project deadline was looming, we ended up having multiple meetings to decide if there’s any features we could scrap, or defer to a later release. After the first meeting where we decided scope, he may as well have said “You know those items you said we need to do and couldn’t defer them, are you sure we can’t defer them”, because he was arranging subsequent meetings to go back over them. When we came up with estimates which showed that we would need at least another month, he was then arranging another meeting to re-estimate them.
The Architects
An important project started around the same time ours did. Our architect, Adam [Architect], was reassigned to the new project. Andy [Architect] joined our team as a replacement. He wasn’t completely new to the company but wasn’t familiar with this area of the system. Additionally, I don’t think he even looked at the software or even requested a demo.
Any question we asked him, he ended up making an excuse that he was busy and will get back to me later. Then when he did answer, I then sent a message to the original architect, Adam, and he said Andy had asked Adam about it and simply relayed the message back to us. So basically Andy wasn’t doing anything. We had him officially assigned, but it was Adam [Architect] that was answering the questions but via a middle-man.
The July Cancellation
There was a bit of disruption when our project looked to be cancelled, but there was apparently some mis-communication.
Hi All, a decision has been made by Directors to stop Batch Approval and to move resources across to pick up Project France instead. Therefore I will be cancelling the Batch Approval meetings.
Project Manager
1 day Later
The directors had decided to move you to the new project so I cancelled the meetings, but then I find that there wasn’t a firm decision from the Directors.
Project Manager
Brian has asked us to proceed with Batch Approval as originally planned. Sorry about the chaos dudes. They must be smoking some good drugs upstairs.
Olivia [Product Owner]
It was off the table, then someone put it back on the table, then someone else swept it off the table, then someone picked it up off the floor and put it back on the table.
Andy [Architect]
Coding Tales
Colin [Technical Manager]: "What sprint are you in?"
Me: "I dunno"
Colin [Technical Manager]: "you are the team lead, you should know"
Me: "No one in the team knows"
Put it in a new tab but make it behave like a dialog
The original UX designs looked like it fit nicely in the existing Task Framework. The requirements were that Batch Approval had:
Its own folder but is a sub-folder of Approvals
Opening a task opens it in a new tab
After looking at the code though, the framework didn’t actually support a sub-item. But we found a basic workaround to make it look like it did. However, there were quite a few features that we got “for free”, but we didn’t want them because they weren’t appropriate for a sub folder. So I had to disable the features by hacky code.
If you double click a task, then it opens in a new tab, which is what they wanted. However, they then didn’t want you to be able to navigate away into other parts of the system, and the Task Framework didn’t support that. With a bit of a workaround, I got that working, but the tab was designed to view one task only, and we are displaying a Batch of them. A few weeks went by and I managed to cobble something together, but the code was awful.
I took a step back and thought about it.
We have a tab that the users surely would expect to be able to move away from to view other tabs.
I’m using this “tab” which is designed for a single task, and I want multiple. So I had to make my own custom page.
We have hacked a sub folder and had to basically fight against the codebase to get it all working…
So why don’t we just have a button on the main folder, and it launches a modal dialog?
It would take a couple of days to get working,
the code would be neat,
and I think it’s what the user would expect.
After speaking to UX about it, they were happy with my proposal. I had wasted about 3 weeks trying to get it working like they previously wanted. Also, we are again telling UX what a good UX design is.
Scrollbar
The UX was also clear that we didn’t want a scrollbar to appear, and instead we use pagination. I didn’t see anything obvious in the standard DataGridView Winforms control, although I’m sure this is a common problem/requirement.
I ended up writing my own logic to add controls to the grid, keep track of the size, then stop adding when the size exceeds the height of the control. However, if there is only 1 very large task, we have no choice but to use a scrollbar.
The problem we encountered was that sometimes a scrollbar did appear when it shouldn’t. I made some tweaks to the calculation and it seemed to work fine. But then a Tester found a combination of task sizes where it still appeared. I couldn’t work out what I was missing in the calculations but it seemed about 4 pixels off, so I just added that into the calculation. Again, all seemed fine for a few days, but then the Tester found a combination of sizes where it still appeared.
Olivia [Product Owner] suggested that we detect when there is a scrollbar then disable the Approve button until the user scrolls down.
I said if we know when the scrollbar is there, why don’t we just remove the last task and check for the scrollbar again, repeat until the scrollbar has gone. I thought the code would be messy, and I’d end up writing a stupid code comment like “mate, something has gone wrong with the calculations here, so we’re gonna have to do some jiggery pokery to get out of this mess”.
Adam [Architect] did suggest some alternatives and they were just as wildly wrong.
Dean, a developer in another team agreed to help, and after a couple of days, he says “you can just set the vertical scrollbar to be disabled”.
But if the scrollbar is appearing so you have to scroll to view the content, then surely disabling the scrollbar will mean content is off the screen?
I tested his idea, and it worked fine! What must be happening is that the vertical scrollbar appears and takes some of the horizontal space… which causes the text to wrap and creates the need for more vertical space. Therefore the scrollbar is required and so remains. But if you tell the scrollbar it cannot appear, then the controls are added, and my calculations meant it fit perfectly in the grid.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Olivia [Product Owner]: Do we have concerns about the unknowns?
Tim [Tester]: It's just the unknowns that we don't know about
I feel like you need to know the system inside and out to be able to safely implement this
Conflict With The UX Team
UX: “We want to minimise pop-ups”
Also UX: “Add a pop up after closing the dialog”
Ulrika [UX] had to take time off to deal with some personal problems. Ursula [UX] agreed to join the meeting we arranged on the Wednesday.
“I don’t work Thursday/Friday and have to leave early on a Wednesday to get the kids. I’ll get back to you next week”.
Ursula covers for Ulrika but then also has time off.
When she got back to us, she seemed to overlook how users access this restricted part of the system, and it turned out none of the UX team actually had this knowledge. So halfway through the project, we were discovering new requirements because they hadn’t designed the user flow.
Don’t Have Time
In early January, we were waiting for UX to give us some approved text but they seemed to be taking their time. I asked Olivia [Product Owner] what was going on, and she said that we don’t have time to make any more changes so they “needed to stop requesting changes”. Even though I pointed out that I was the one requesting changes, she said “we don’t have time to test” (even though it only involved quickly checking some text has changed on a message box). Nearly 2 months went by before we actually began to release.
After more protests from me, she says:
“The text is fine for now. We don’t have time to be changing it.”
Olivia [Product Owner]
When it came for the final review, reviewers questioned why we had dialogs with some ToDO comments on it saying “ToDo: Awaiting UX approval“. Even if you don’t have comments like that, I have seen developers question the user-facing messages if the grammar isn’t correct or sounds unclear. It definitely wasn’t clear because we just wrote the first thing that popped into our heads at the time; knowing the text would be replaced.
I think what had happened was that Mary [Technical Manager] and Olivia [Product Owner] had fallen out with Ulrika [UX], and then was refusing to authorise her changes. Remember, tensions will have been building since users criticised Ulrika’s design and wanted Mary’s design, and Mary’s arrogance about it wouldn’t have gone down well.
It’s just part of the process though – all text needs to be approved by the UX team; otherwise what is the point of their team?
Conflict With The Architect
When we implemented Adam [Architect]’s suggested invalidation logic, we thought the criteria was too restrictive. Adam was off on annual leave for a few weeks so we couldn’t consult him. So we made our own decision to change it, and got Carl [Customer Representative] and Grace [Safety & Legal Governance] in agreement. However, when the Architect saw it, he said it was unsafe. In many meetings, I got the impression Grace wasn’t really listening and she tended to agree with what we said. Not exactly great when your job involves telling the team what is safe and legal, and then get overruled by the Architect.
We came up with a compromise, and implemented it. Then when it came to the Code Review, Adam suggested removing one more of the sub-rules which I think would be perfect, but then Olivia [Product Owner] was reluctant for us to make more changes.
Then a week later, Olivia said she would arrange another meeting to discuss the rules because she felt it might be too restrictive. OMG. However, she then seemed to have personal grievances with Adam, so told me not to make the simple change, even though it would be what we want. She used the excuse of lack of Testing time.
Adam [Architect]
We shouldn’t be knowingly introducing bugs.
Olivia [Product Owner]
This is not a bug. It’s a change to the criteria and we are not going to change it a week before we finish. I am speaking to Carl [Customer Representative] about changing the criteria, and we’ll look at it then.
Adam [Architect]
A bug is any deviation from requirements. Why are you planning on changing it if it is not a bug?
Olivia [Product Owner]
That’s not a bug. You are right in the sense that we need to change it…we’re just not changing it now. I was happy to leave it as it was to get this out of the door. That’s my call to make.
Mary [Technical Manager]
There's a lot that's not right. But how long do we keep going until we give it to the customers?
A summary of how this situation appears to me:
There is a process, but if you declare you want to move the process to the next release, then it is fine.
It will take too long to change a few lines of code, so we ain’t doing it. Apart from when it is a comment on the Code Review, then we are doing it, apart from those that we aren’t.
It takes longer for Olivia [Product Owner] to argue against it than to fix it.
The CEO had recently posted:
“The most important thing we do every day is keep our users and their customers safe by managing risk effectively. I know you all know this, but it warrants repeating: safety is our number 1 priority all day, every day – regardless of anything else that is going on. It trumps everything. Please always remember that.”
CEO
Our Managers are like:
“Next release”
The Technical Manager change
Colin [Technical Manager] complains that Daniel [Developer] and I haven’t handled the project well – and it overran by over a month at that point. A week or so later, the team was on a call with other stakeholders and he said
“you guys have done a tremendous job”,
Colin
then said the delay “was caused purely by scope-creep and nothing to do with the developers at all”.
“Mary is in charge of the team since yesterday”
Colin [Technical Manager] with his timely announcement
I got the impression that Mary just wanted to get rid of the project, because it was dragging on for far too long.
The Testers had nothing to do since us Developers were working on the last few bug fixes. Tina [Tester] said she was just re-testing old features to pass the time, but also get extra confidence there are no remaining bugs. Mary [Technical Manager] replied:
“should we be doing testing when changes are ongoing?”
Mary
Well, in that case, this statement means testers should only be hired for a couple of weeks right at the end of a project – since changes are constantly ongoing. I think she might have intended it to mean like “you’d better not find more bugs!”, but if there are bugs, then you definitely want to find them before our users do.
On the last day of the Sprint, Tina [Tester] took annual leave. She had left her assigned items in the “To Test” column of the Kanban board. There was no evidence she had tested the item, so I don’t think it wasn’t a case of just forgetting to move to “PO Approval” column. Olivia [Product Owner] and Mary [Technical Manager] then decided to just close the items. No evidence, no demo – just close them so the Sprint looks good, and looks ready to release.
What annoys me is that Mary had criticised how we had run our team and suggested we don’t follow the process. She stated that she perfectly follows the process – which leads to her successful projects. Then I see her cutting corners like that.
Just like Colin, she criticises me to my face, but then when we are in a group she states:
“I think you’ve done a fantastic job given that there’s only 4 of you”
Mary
A few days later, I had finished what I was assigned, but there was a bug on the backlog which Mary [Technical Manager] seemed to want to defer (again, she just wanted to release the project as soon as possible). I thought it couldn’t be released without this fix. I stated that I would like to look at it and she said:
“don’t do any development work”
Mary
Seems I have the day off then. What is the point in me sat around doing nothing? If I fix it, we can decide if it goes straight in, or deferred for the next release. Or maybe I won’t even find a solution. She just seemed desperate to finish the project so wasn’t considering the seriousness of the bug, or thinking logically at all.
The Backstab
I didn’t actually sit around doing nothing. I worked hard and found a solution. I knew that there was no chance Mary would accept my changes, so I needed to come up with a way of convincing her. My plan was to get the testers to informally test it, then I can say that I have a fix, and the testers are happy that there’s low risk of introducing more issues – so she would be stupid to reject it.
Testers Tim and Tina were in agreement that the fix should definitely go out in the initial release, and they agreed Mary was making a bad decision to consider releasing without it.
Tim said he would “have to check with Mary if he was allowed to spend time testing it” since they got told not to test anything. I said “there is no way she would approve it, that’s why we are doing this informally/secretively”. If Tim and Tina test it and find a bug, my plan has failed and Mary never needs to know that I attempted it.
It’s a perfect plan, or it would have been, but Tim then goes and tells Mary that I asked them to test it.
“You gotta start being better with your comminications – it’s not just yours and Tim/Tina’s decision if something gets put into the release – it’s a whole team decision but ultimately mine and Olivia’s. You’ve messaged them directly asking if they can get it tested, and as much as they’ll also want to get it done, it then puts them under pressure. This is how you’ve all got to a stage of being all over the place and burning yourselves out, it’s got to stop please.”
Mary’s chastisement
I shouldn’t have to go behind people’s backs and make my own decisions, but the entire non-management side of the team thought it should go in, and only the managers thought it shouldn’t. As a team we care about quality, but managers are just focussed on deadlines.
I also didn’t appreciate that she is accusing my decision making of adding stress to my team.
80% coverage
As the project got towards completion, I recalled our stupid “Merge Ready” process that no one seems to care about other than the small team who came up with it. You have to justify the likes of Code Coverage, and ours was at a low figure like 10%.
I’ll write some blog posts about my reasoning on when tests are good or bad in the future. A simple explanation is that Units tests are good when covering requirements, but often developers write them to cover implementation i.e. verify a particular method is called; but not that the particular method actually works. When you switch implementation, you have to rewrite a new unit test, slowing you down. Unit Tests are supposed to help you refactor, but in this case, it is a hindrance to refactoring. We did a lot of prototyping early on, and knew there would be large re-writes, so Daniel [Developer] and I decided to worry about Unit Tests later on.
When I declared the low number of Unit Tests, Olivia ended up raising it to the Directors for some reason. Why was it their concern? Do they even know what Unit Tests are for, and what the coverage actually means?
It could jeopordise my chance of payrises (I was correct, I got 0% this year) and tarnishes my reputation.
When Mary joined the team, she berated me over this decision and made the dramatic statement:
“We can’t go on like this”
Mary
She then asked a couple of her favourite developers to write some Unit Tests for my project, completely undermining me.
The thing is, both Dean [Developer (Temporary)] and Dennis [Developer (Temporary)] spent way longer than they estimated, and they didn’t do as much as they hyped, then when it came to make the last few changes, it slowed us down.
We ended up around 22% in the end, and the managers decided that is fine.
That’s the problem with us though… Do 80% coverage because it’s important. But actually it’s not that important, so you don’t need 80%. But TRY get 80%, Why?, Dunno, but the Document says.
Tim [Tester]
On track
Dennis [Developer (Temporary)] was also asked to helping out address the Code Review comments. In some ways, this kinda slowed us down. I told him I had a branch with some changes in already and sent him a link to it so we can work together. When I caught up with him the next day, he said that he had been working on a few of the ones I already had done because he hadn’t looked at the link. What a waste of time.
When Mary asked for a progress report, Dennis reckoned it would take 1 day to go through 20 comments, but he had done 8 easy ones the day before, and we had the hard ones left. So I said it would be more like 4 days, but could take longer if they are surprisingly complicated. I was correct.
Manager: How's the project coming along? Developer: It's on track.
On the final Project Demo, Carl [Customer Representative] was saying the sending process was far too slow. He had been on most of the demos from the start and saw the progress across the project.
The original version I showed him was incredibly slow, but I had managed to speed it up significantly. So despite him witnessing the project months ago, he said the performance was a concern and maybe users would think it wasn’t a significant improvement.
We had all kinds of people turn up to this final demo. People from support, training etc. We should have had those guys on the early meetings. They were prodding holes in the requirements and asking important questions. Although we gave good answers for most of them, I couldn’t help but think our changes might not be as useful as we thought.
If only we got more users involved throughout the project, rather than just some UX mock-ups before we started, and then a year later – give them the update and hope for the best.
I’d like to reiterate just how hard the team has worked. They have worked their little socks off
Olivia [Product Owner]
Conclusion
We were told the importance of the project, but because there wasn’t a direct commercial aspect to the project, I felt it wasn’t backed up by the number of developers assigned to the project. With only 2 developers, then key staff like Architects and Product Owners switching throughout the project; it just slowed us all down and made us all feel it was actually a low-priority project.
There were other morale-reducing aspects like when we were told the project was on hold, then Mary berating my decisions, and implying the failures were down to me.
There wasn’t a great understanding of the feature in many ways, illustrated by
how many requirements we discovered throughout the project,
the UX team being clueless about many aspects,
one Product Owner so clueless – it seemed he struggled to use a computer,
then switching to a clueless Architect that just went straight to the original architect.
When a new development team is created, managers insist on creating a “Ways of Working” which essentially comes down to describing the software development and testing process in the ideal way.
Then after a few weeks, you end up just resorting to the default way of working.
The “ideal” way assumes that the Testers can provide ideas and inspiration to the Developer, and when the Developer writes the fix, the solution won’t deviate from their original perception. Therefore, all the Test Cases are written up front, and none are needed to be written after.
Here is an example that one of my former teams came up with:
Before fixing the defect
Analyse together
Make sure you pair up as a developer and tester to work on the defect.
Review the problem together
Understand how to replicate the fault
Understand the extent of the problem (all regions, all set-ups, all environments?)
Do the initial debugging to understand where the problem lies
Fixing the defect
The developer MUST
Make sure there are unit tests to support the current functionality
If there aren’t unit tests then implement a simple refactor which will allow appropriate unit tests to be added
Add unit tests that prove the defect (which will fail)
Fix the defect
Get it code reviewed
If you are working on code you are not familiar with, get 2 reviews, one of which must be from an expert
Run all the unit tests and prove the fix
The tester MUST
• Write test cases with steps and expected results for the initial test cases. They must
○ Be clear and unambiguous
○ Cover the different scenarios/circumstances/options
○ Not test things that are irrelevant
• Once written, set the state to “Review” and assign to the reviewer
• The reviewer
○ Adds comments as appropriate
○ Set the state to “Ready” if Ok, or back to “Design” if it needs changes
○ Assign it back the test author
• Only use Given, When, Then if you are using Specflow to automate your tests
• Only use exploratory testing
○ If you have passed a Rapid Testing course
○ And you have a clear understanding of testing heuristics
○ And you plan and classify sessions, keep session logs, run debriefs
○ And all the specific test cases and all regression test cases have been executed
• Create regression tests of the functionality
• Create test case(s) to prove the defect
• Get the tests reviewed
• If you are working on functionality you are not familiar with, get 2 reviews, one must be from an expert
Assure the Quality
Review the actual changes together
Understand the logic
Understand the scope
Minor/contained (inside a method that’s inside a class that doesn’t affect anything that’s outside it)
Medium/impacting (a change that impacts outside it’s own class or is called from elsewhere in the system
Major/widespread (a complete refactoring of existing code or large changes to core features)
If they don’t understand the logic or can’t establish the scope, escalate to the Technical Manager
Execute the tests
Attach and link all work items and evidence together
We recently had a Development department meeting. One person raised a point about the recent higher-than-normal staff turnover, and also commented on the number of cancelled projects:
“If we look at Group Technology that I’m part of as an example, a lot of our staff turnover can be attributed to problems specific to the department and specific to development work: onerous manual, slow processes, moving from one cancelled product / project to another etc.. Some developers have been working here years and never worked on anything that has actually got to the customers for example. How do we propose to tackle those specific culture problems?”
I thought it was funny, because I knew one particular developer who had worked on a small cancelled project, then worked on – what was supposed to be – a replacement for our flagship software. Then when that project got restarted, he moved back to our flagship product on what was supposed to be the most important project; which also got canned.
Andy Marsden 16:18
i just love free shares
we got 50 last year, basically like £600 for nothing
Me 16:18
Our wage is basically for nothing
remember that time your code went to production?
Andy Marsden 16:19
no
is it just me that doesn't care about who uses my code?
i just like writing code
Me 16:19
Andy is writing code for the terrorists
Andy Marsden 16:20
haha
seen something before that's like a moral question:
"As a developer, if an oppressive government took over and forced you to write code to destroy Paris for example, would you write it flexibly so that it could be used to destroy any city?"
i couldn't bring myself to do it (write rigid code that only destroys Paris)
At the start of last year, the CEO had made a big fuss about a Scotland project that needed doing by Jan 2023, so many of our best staff members were assigned to it and were told not to help out with any other requests. As it got closer to the end of the year, there were discussions to cancel it, and eventually it was canned. You are talking approximately 30 staff members and paying them for a year of work. Completely binned off. Well, they said it had been shelved until our new software is released, but given that it has been in development since around 2018, is that ever going to be finished?
Stranger Coding Tings 