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Mike was a server admin at your typical everyday Initech. One day, project manager Bill stopped by his cube with questions from Jay, the developer of an internal Java application.
“Hello there- thanks for your time!” Bill dropped into Mike’s spare chair. “We needed your expertise on this one.”
In the world of software development, you have customers, who request and ultimately use the software, and development organizations, who build and test said software. Of course, it's never that simple. At some point, the customer has to try using the software in order to sign off on it.
At least in a sane business arrangement. Sometimes, things get all twisted around.
Francis was at the start of what was sure to be a challenging and rewarding journey towards a degree in Computer Science. One of his first classes was a group study course built around cross-departmental education. It forced together a Business major named Suzanna to play the role of Project Manager, Francis and Carlos, another CS student, as developers, and a Music major named Johann, as a tester. Assignments and interaction with the instructor were all online, but the group met in person to work on their project.
Andrei had just moved to a new country, and was looking for work. With the ideal job not immediately forthcoming, he jumped when an interesting opportunity opened at a small tech company: OldIsNewCo.
OldIsNewCo was one of the pioneers bridging the gap between old methods of communication (e.g. paper) and new methods of communication (i.e. the Internet), and was looking to overhaul their entire infrastructure. Their existing backend was built in C++, and according to The Big Boss: “C++ developers are expensive and hard to find. PHP developers are plentiful and cheap. Therefore, we need to re-implement everything in PHP.”
This seemed fishy to Andrei right from the start, but he figured it would be a good opportunity to brush up on his C++ and PHP skills and experience, and “a job’s a job”. So he accepted the position and met with his development tour guide to start diving into the sources and seeing how the backend applications worked.
Peter Drucker said "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," and you'll never see a better example of what that means than when a big company tries to digest a small one. As a helpdesk support tech, Woody had a front-row seat for the merger between his employer, a 100-person shop named Initech, and Megatrode, a hulking giant of a corporation that saw Initech as (according to the stirring on-boarding speech given to Woody's team by one of Megatrode's seven-dozen VPs) "a strategic acquisition in the enterprise space." Drucker's remark became more than just a pithy witticism when the time came to bring Initech's systems in line with Megatrode's Byzantine corporate policies. First on the long list of blanket edicts: "local admin rights for all users".
Woody's boss, Ryan, stumbled into Woody's cube and poured himself into the spare chair. He delivered the new policy with a cheerful "what could go wrong?" But Woody had never seen him look less cheerful: since the merger, Ryan's days had been an endless series of conference calls with Megatrode's Hydra-headed IT departments, trying to address their disparate and frequently contradictory support procedures. Woody was sorry to burst his boss's bubble. "Something already has," he said, pointing to his inbox. "Eleven—make that twelve—users have reported that the shortcuts to the network databases have gone missing from their desktops."
Tests. What can you really say about them? They are a royal pain to write and an even bigger pain to keep current as code changes. Nevertheless, we all (should) write them because they help verify that changes to the code don't break something and that the code works properly.
Of course, in order to be of any real value, the tests need to be useful tests. For example, a test to verify that setting the value of an integer to 5 and then immediately reading that integer to see if it's actually 5 doesn't really add any value. The same applies to tests like this:
Drew worked for a petite e-commerce company, where his primary responsibility was to keep everything running. He saw to day-to-day maintenance, as well as backup and disaster recovery.
The small shop’s resources were limited. Critical data remained tied up in onsite legacy systems- and of course, the “supply closet” was full of relics from a clunkier, floppier era. Drew did the best he could to shield the company from server outages, power outages, backup failures, and other common scenarios.
"Glory to Arstotzka!"
It was already 7pm, and Jeff was almost finished packing his things and heading home. He was looking forward to a nice can of local beer and a video chat with his girlfriend, which he had to leave a few timezones away when an unexpected government contract popped up. American at heart, but eager to explore different cultures, he agreed to provide technical support for Arstotzkan foreign affairs department – and a hefty pay helped to seal the deal.
Dec 14