Someday, I should write a book about the outrageous things I’ve seen in IT at Fortune 250’s. For now, the short story is that — once again — my little solo project has achieved great success, and attracted people who can’t stand to see that, and are now taking it over. So a new group is creating a new database to hold all the data my application uses (and more), and once it’s running, I am supposed to refactor my application to use it.
For the third time since June and the delivery of “MVP 2.1” — whatever that’s supposed to mean — this group has said their system is up and running and ready to be used for my refactoring efforts, and for the third time, it doesn’t work. The first time, every non-trivial query would time out. The second time, the results came back quickly, but were completely wrong. This time, no queries work again, and the strange errors I see apparently mean that the system isn’t even running! Uh… then why did you tell me it was ready?!
They keep hassling me to validate the system, but I’m like, guys, I’m testing this with the queries YOU gave me. YOU can run them first, and tell if it’s even working/running. YOU have just as much access to the canonical source of the data. YOU can check the correctness just as well as I can. You’re embarrassing yourselves.
I can’t even imagine the mentality of somehow being the guy working on this, doing things to the system, and then telling management it’s ready, when they didn’t even give it a try! I’m not even talking about test suites or automated testing in CI/CD! First: Does it answer queries? Second: Is the data correct? If you can’t verify those two simple things, what business do you have telling anyone that the system is ready?! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.