When the Manager Went Fishing

A long time ago in a work group far away there was a bunch of problems coming up in a code base whilst the manager (who had written the very code we were debugging) was up to his knees in a Scottish stream on a salmon fishing holiday....

So yeah, the code didn't work, it was a statemachine implemented in a bunch of "if" statements a smattering of switch statements and flags which were not properly mutually exclusive... so it was a statemachine in name only really.

This particular piece of code was responsible for paying money out of a machine, and as such came under scrutiny when customers started to notice that it was either paying out more than expected or the players of the machine noticed it was paying far less than expected.  A double whammy.

This problem was looked at first by a chap in the team who didn't really get along with anyone else, and he asserted he had solved the problem... I wasn't his manager, but we accepted his word on the matter and issued a release.  This turned out to be the start of a series of problems, for with the focus on this problem the test department took it upon themselves to actually test this fault to within an inch of it's life, and of course they found the problem persisted.

The wheels then came off this development train.

For the technically senior person in the department didn't get on with the chap who had looked at this problem first, they did not get on at all... not one jot.

And I ended up sitting between these two as both a debugging sounding board but physical altercation deterrent, which it's a great place to stand between coworkers who really just needed to grow up.

The debugging progressed from the mess of code into a rewrite of one function, and this started with a large discussion around a 10 foot white board (I love working on a whiteboard).

We came up with the expected behaviour, worked out the inputs we knew and then how to get that expected output to physically happen, and did so.

It worked, it would have taken that one day.... The test department were happy with their results.

The problem?  All releases had to go through review and the binaries built and packaged by one specific person... The Manager... who was still scaring salmon with a pointed stick.

We had to get on the phone to him, do you know how patchy mobile reception is in the highlands?... No... Well, "VERY" is the best way to put it.  We managed to speak to him twice, but then had to get his permission at every step, "Do the work" it's done, "build the binary" it's built, "package the update" it's compressed, "create the release notary" it's written... 

All these calls back and forth to stitch together what should have been my simply putting the package on a flash stick and handing it to the test department (because they tested everything off of our network to be as real to our operating environment as possible).

It was a nightmare... An utter break down in co-worker communications between the other two chaps, the manager not releasing the reins of control*... The slow turn around of a build and messy nature of the codebase we had to edit... not to mention that the problem was subtle and caused by a miss-understanding between the true behaviour of a physical device compared to the expected virtual representation of it within the system's view.

There, that's what happens when the manager went fishing.

* In the hope of accruing himself come modicum of job security by appearing to be a key man.