Be Brave to Get Work Done

I was woken up this morning from a call from work. Not a good sign. Apparently the customer found a potential problem in our delivery. I got on a conference call to sort the thing out. Yes. There was a problem. Our whole team went into high gear to get this problem done.

First we brought in another senior developer. The problem and our proposed solution was discussed a second time around. Our team lead asked everyone if they understood what needed to be done. Everyone concurred. We split the work up 5 ways because there were 5 of us. Then we broke to get it done.

Immediately I get a call from someone on our team. He was asking what he needed to do. WTF? I told him if he was not clear, he should have spoken up at the meeting. No need to save face and waste my time. I could not do his work and mine, because I got lions portion of the share to do.

I gave him a quick synopsis and told him to get it done. If he found that he could not do it or it was impossible to do, he would have to convene a meeting with the whole team so we could regroup. I got a couple more calls and emails from him. Eventually he completed his task. Of course he was the last one done. So he did not look good anyway in the end.

Come on people. Put your pride aside and step up. Don't try to use someone else as a crutch. You are hurting yourself and the whole team.

Quality Assurance

I work in the back end on my current project. It is a big database reporting project. My role is to provide the structure for new tables, write code to load those tables, and sometimes write the code to create database views. You would think that would be a straight forward job. Not so.

 

We have a lot of environments for our system. I work in a personal schema. We have another schema that I share with other developers. I consider that an integration schema. Then there is a separate schema for our internal testers. Plus one for our customer acceptance testers. We have a performance environment with a lot of data. Then there is production.

 

Recently there have been numerous problems deploying changes to these environments. The process is for me to check code into Clearcase source code control. Then I submit a ticket in ClearQuest to request deployment of my changes. After me there is a long chain of people involved before my changes get deployed in the assorted environments.

 

The deployment problems culminated in a specific delivery we failed three times in a row. Some managers tried to understand what in the world is going on. Their conclusion was that developers such as myself need to guarantee that the deployments are done correctly.

 

Now my life involves emails where somebody will run a massive deployment which includes my changes, produce a huge log or logs. Then they ask me if the deployment was done correctly. LOL wut? This got old the first time I had to pour through the logs. Not only that, I got to go to the target environment and actually check if my changes are in there.

 

I don’t want to spend my days doing quality assurance for a bunch of people who work on the deployments and just ask me if they got it right. I want to be doing development. Perhaps the right way to look at this is as an opportunity to automate the verification of the deployments. I figured we could use some kind of embedded versioning to identify what is deployed. Or I could buld some smarts into a script that checks for the specific changes made.