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Oct 14Classic WTF - The Defect Black Market
by in Feature Articles on 2014-11-28For us, the day after Thanksgiving is typically known as "Black Friday". There is nothing sinister about it - oh no - just lots and lots of opportunities to go shopping and save cash along the way and take businesses from the "red" (loss) to black (profit!). This reminded me of an article from July 2012 that I'm positive that you'll enjoy.
When Damon's coworker stopped by his cubicle for a chat, Damon wondered if they should have met in a dark alley somewhere. Damon, a developer, and his coworker in quality assurance were meeting to trade bugs on the newly created Defect Black Market.
While combing the server logs for clues as to what might have caused the latest incident in staging, Steve was startled to find that the box he was looking at hadn't logged anything for months.
Alex's customers were having issues with a web project management console developed by a coworker. Upon opening the code to see what was causing all the JavaScript errors, he learned that the original developer was clearly an expert in web development standards. The code file itself was JavaScript. The use of the .css() function definitely proved his mastery of Cascading Style Sheets. Hard-coded tags demonstrated his deep knowledge of HTML. Finally, his variable naming scheme is essential to maintaining the coveted "Now I Know My ABC's" certification.
Simon worked in a small shop that supported a sales system. One of the features of the system was that sales commissions were stored in the database. For the sake of simplicity, the sales commissions were stored as the multiplier factor needed to compute the total sale. For example, a 5% commission on $100 would be $5, so the factor would be 1.05 so you could just multiply: 100 * 1.05 -> 105.
Given the title, most of you are expecting a story that goes as follows: Boy meets girl. Girl writes phone number inside a book in a used book store. Ten years pass and boy searches for book. Boy finds book and gets girl. But not this time. Instead, Andrew is the source of a story that ranks much higher on the believability scale.
We've all dealt with marketing people who, in the very depths of their souls, believe that if they promise something to a customer, it will magically happen. Regardless of actual manpower, time or cost. It will work perfectly the first time, and every time, because they promised that it would. It will be cheaper than they expected because, let's face it, how hard could it be to build something, even if it's merely software...?