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Test plan development. Regression analysis. Systems documentation creation. Test case execution. Regression testing.
If you're anything like me, then those words may as well have been boring, tedious, mind-numbing, tiresome, dreary, and the-worst-thing-in-the-world. Sure, they're all important and necessary, but you found out that, due to budgetary constraints, you couldn't personally do any of those things and could only focus on coding, you probably wouldn't complain. Julien G. certainly didn't mind, especially since the "drudge work" would still get done by the overseas team while everyone state-side was fast asleep.
Naturally, many of the other developers were upset that their work was being sent overseas. Emotions ranged from annoyed to absolute outrage, and some were angered to the point of resignation. Eventually, things cooled down and developers bought management's pitch that "the world-class, high-quality engineers" would be good for "synergizing and strategizing the bottom line."
Grouped Together
The offshore developers were split apart into different teams. There was one for infrastructure, one for database and data integrity, and another for working with the application's User Interface. This latter group was the one that Julien worked with.
Their job, in part, was to act as any dull, average customer and regression test the application. If at any point the application crashed or behaved strangely, they were to document the conditions leading up to the crash and send them back to with details of how the problem was recreated.
At first, things were rough. Julien spent many a late night with the offshore team, walking them through their hellishly complex application. But Julien felt it was worthwhile, as it forced him and his group to be more organized and provide more exact specs and concrete test cases. Soon enough, the offshore team was able to jump into the application and provide the right information back to developers, and the developers were sending back recompiled libraries to test with as quickly as possible.
As a result of the growing synergy, productivity was way up, morale was up, and — to the delight of management — the bottom line cost was way down. From all angles, everything looked like puppies and rainbows. That is, until it was time for Offshore Integration Phase 2.
Phasing Fail
With all the initial pains of getting the offshore team trained on using their software, it was time to put their "world-class" engineering skills to use. In addition to running loads of manual regression tests, the offshore team would be responsible for developing automated unit and regression tests. This, of course, meant that they'd need to be given access to the code and set up a testing environment at their location.
Being as large and complex as it was, their application wasn't the type with "run the installer and follow the wizard" installation instructions. In fact, there were 85 steps necessary to complete the installation, ranging from installing the database to editing configuration files. It wasn't all too difficult, as installing the application on a local workstation was often the first task given to newly-hired developers.
Julien sent these instructions to the offshore team and, the following morning, arrived to find a disappointing email.
Hi Julien, After the program start-up reaches 45%, it quits unexpectedly. Please confirm that latest code is the most recent. Regards, Ravi M. Implementation and QA Lead Hyderabad Group Inc.
After some re-verification, Julien confirmed that he had, in fact, sent the latest code. Just to make sure the install instructions were valid, he spent a good two hours installing the application on a brand-new server. The only thing he could guess was that some third-party component wasn't properly installed, so he sent an email back to Ravi to verify all components.
Hi Julien, All components installed as per instructions. We followed instructions three times, each time with a freshly formatted server. It still quits when the program start-up reaches 45%. Please advise. Regards, Ravi M. Implementation and QA Lead Hyderabad Group Inc.
The email routine continued, each time with the offshore team insisting that every instruction was followed perfectly. After a few weeks, the offshore managers had their weekly conference call with state-side managers and in doing so, accused the developers — specifically Julien — of blocking the offshore team's progress. With things getting heated up, Julien was charged with the task of watching the offshore group perform the install and configuration step-by-step, via a shared desktop across a sluggish network connection... at 3:00AM his time.
Just Following Orders
It was only about 4:30am when Julien was on his third cup of coffee, asking the offshore team to confirm step number 32 of 85 on the install and setup list. Julien was in the midst of wondering how feasible it might be to set up a recording of him saying "un-huh - confirmed' to go off at set intervals when he noticed something amiss in their copy/pasting of environment variables from the setup document.
"Hey guys," Julien jumped in, "did you do anything different this time with the setup? Like right now?"
"No," the offshore engineer responded, "we executed the steps exactly as prescribed."
"Okay, Julien said, "can you scroll back up a little bit in the configuration file?"
The offshore engineer complied and, located near the top, the following code stuck out:
' Environment variable for test provider ' set PATH_TO_TST_ENV=Path to the test environment (absolute, such as C:\TestEnv)
The line was exactly as it had appeared in the setup document — copied verbatim — beneath a heading that read: "Please recreate the application configure file precisely as listed below"
At this point, Julien could have died from shock if he weren't so tired. Baffled, he asked why they didn't substitute the path with the directory they had created in the previous step. "This is what you instructed us to do," the offshore engineer replied, "we followed exactly what was in the documents to avoid making any mistakes."
It was an unfortunate "ah-hah moment" for Julien; not only did the offshore engineer's response explain the issue at hand, but it explained a whole host of otherwise unexplainable and unreproducible bugs. After that day, Julien learned to be a lot more specific and careful with what he wrote. And while his days are no longer filled with running test cases, he's found he spends an awful lot of time testing and "debugging" the test cases, which, somehow, takes several times longer than executing them.
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