Problem Child

I was asked to help out another team around a year or so ago. It seems I did too good of a job. Now I am responsible for this piece of their system. I would not mind if I could maintain these piece full time. But I already have a full time job. I am supposed to work this additional piece in my "free time".

Just this past week I got an email from our customer. Apparently they did not see the results from last week's run of the software. I checked the audits in the database. Found no evidence of the job being run. Then I logged into the operating system. The logs on the file system also show the job did not run. What the heck is going on here?

The particular job is run as a cron job. It has been running successfully for some time. Now I need to debug this anomaly. My first task is to ensure the job is still in the crontab. Unfortunately I do not have access to the production crontab. Furthermore, there is some type of procedure I need to go through to get assistance from the system administrators of the production system.

This issue is going to take some time to resolve. Previously I had hoped to pass this task on to the actual team responsible for this system. Unfortunately they are in upheaval as some key members of the team recently resigned. I guess I am stuck with this puppy for the time being. It is time to make lemonade out of this lemon.

Versioning

I am responsible for designing some new features in the next big release of our software. The project manager told me I would be handing my design over to the new guys for implementation. Therefore I wanted my design to be as clear as possible. I waited until the other developers were finished with adding their designs to our one design document. Then I grabbed the latest version and started making some changes.

I had some trouble with Rational Rose. The latest version on my system was broken. I tried to get a sys admin to fix it. Turns out he broke more than he fixed. I finally got access to a virtual machine that has Rational Rose on it. I drew some crucial sequence diagrams, as well as a class diagram of all the important clasees.

Today I was getting ready to check in my design document changes, when I found that somebody else had usurped me. My boss created a new version of the design doc. That means my changes were made to an out of date version of the document. Ouch. We use Sharepoint for the documentation. You are supposed to coordinate with the rest of the team. Who knew the boss would be making changes as well?