What posesses them?
Author
Discussion

Plotloss

Original Poster:

67,280 posts

300 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all


A lot of the code that runs our system is generated from a couple of CASE tools.

In the last 10 minutes or so it has come to light that a web service project that was working perfectly has all of a sudden stopped working for no apparent reason.

On doing a small amount of investigation it transpires that the generated source has been hacked by hand, incorrectly I might add, recompiled and put into a live environment without any testing whatsoever.

This could only have been done by 4 people due to security restrictions and all of these people are Project Managers or above who should know bloody better!

Grrr

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

GRRR!

zumbruk

7,848 posts

290 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Have you never been tempted to put in a "quick fix", especially when being leaned on by management to "just fix it"?

But I know what you mean!

Plotloss

Original Poster:

67,280 posts

300 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Its not the quickness of fix so much its the lack of testing. Quick and dirtys are huge fun I think but only when they work.

Hanslow

838 posts

275 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Plotloss said:
Its not the quickness of fix so much its the lack of testing. Quick and dirtys are huge fun I think but only when they work.


And only when the person knows what they are doing. As it was a project manager, I doubt that very much

squirrelz

1,186 posts

301 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Cor, that was close, you nearly used "Project Manager" and "knows what they're doing" in the same sentence!

(apologies to any good project managers who read this - you're a rare breed).

Don

28,378 posts

314 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
"It was such a small change - I thought I couldn't get it wrong"

SMACK!

"It was such a small change - I didn't realise it would have knock on effects!"

SMACK!

"But the users really wanted the feature. It worked OK on my machine."

SMACK!

Oh I could go on...and not all of the above were done by people working for me, either. Sometimes one has to learn the hard way.

leosayer

7,830 posts

274 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Hanslow said:

Plotloss said:
Its not the quickness of fix so much its the lack of testing. Quick and dirtys are huge fun I think but only when they work.



And only when the person knows what they are doing. As it was a project manager, I doubt that very much


Someone's got to do the work while the developer's busy surfing

Plotloss

Original Poster:

67,280 posts

300 months

Friday 18th February 2005
quotequote all
Don said:
"It was such a small change - I thought I couldn't get it wrong"

SMACK!

"It was such a small change - I didn't realise it would have knock on effects!"

SMACK!

"But the users really wanted the feature. It worked OK on my machine."

SMACK!

Oh I could go on...and not all of the above were done by people working for me, either. Sometimes one has to learn the hard way.


I've taken the 'Well of course I can fix it but what will you and the rest of your team learn from that?' approach.

Its capturing the data just not writing the policies. They dont know this so they can spend the weekend in fear of their jobs...