Double Play

Contracting seemed the best way for Ann-Marie to gain a foothold in the IT industry. She wasn't the best or the brightest, and her CV was heavy on toy languages and light on experience. But if she got a good solid chance, she knew her no-nonsense attitude and general intelligence would endear her to her boss.

Or maybe it would have, if it weren't for Cindy the Project Manager.

Cindy liked to chew gum at work. No, not chew—pop. It was all Ann-Marie could do to keep her face neutral during her onboarding, when Cindy handed over the employee handbook the team lead had asked her to deliver.

"So, like, these are our standards I guess? Whatever, you'll do fine, I'm not even worried."

Once she was gone, however, things started looking up. Unlike the last few places Ann-Marie had contracted, this one had JIRA and used it heavily, requiring all commits to include a JIRA number for tracking purposes. In addition, she was pleasantly surprised to see a QA department, and reasonable handoff practices: to be handed over to QA, the build had to be passing on the CI server, and earmarked as a release candidate. Commit messages were vital for keeping track of items in progress. They had to be descriptive, yet concise, and no more than one commit per JIRA item so that a relationship between tickets and commits could be established and tracked.

Yeah ... I could stay here, Ann-Marie decided. What's a little gum-popping in exchange for a Joel Number this high?

And so, eager to please, she threw herself into her work. On the first day, she closed five JIRA tickets—all small fixes in disparate portions of the application—as she tried to get a feel for the codebase.

"Wow, you like, really know your stuff," Cindy said, stopping by at the end of the day. "Our last guy didn't do anything for four days. This is going to be the best Bug Blitz ever. Well done!"

Ann-Marie stopped for a smoothie on her way home, confident she'd fit right in at this new job.

It was day three before the first incident happened. She was off to another great start, closing two tickets before 10:00 AM. At first, she assumed that was why Cindy was walking over, until she saw the frown on her manager's face.

"So, like, I don't know if you read the handbook, but we have a policy of not closing more than one ticket with the same JIRA number," Cindy said.

"Yeah, right, so you don't have to pick apart commits if you send one feature but not the other. Totally cool, definitely a best practice." Ann-Marie wondered why this was coming up. Had she accidentally broken policy? No, she'd been careful. One change, one commit.

"Right, right. So what's up with 44 and 89?" Cindy asked, rattling off the numbers with a punctuative pop.

"Uh ..." Ann-Marie pulled up the JIRA tab on her machine, rapidly navigating to 89 and skimming over the comments. "Oh, right, 89! That was fixed by the commit I did yesterday for 45. It had the same root cause."

"Riiight ... so they used the same commit," Cindy said.

"No, see?" Ann-Marie said. "Here, 45 was an error when downloading a document, and 89 was a blank document ID in the details for the document. The user couldn't download the document because it was sending them to a URL with a blank ID in it. The reason for that was because the file ID was omitted from the select columns in the database query that was shared between the two. By changing it so the document's file ID was included in that query, I killed two birds with one stone."

"Right, yeah, see, two birds, one commit. We have a strict policy against that. This can't happen again."

Ann-Marie blinked at Cindy. Was she just not getting through? "Surely something like this has happened before?"

Cindy gave her a flat, vacant look. "Not really." Pop. "We cool?" Pop.

"I ... I really don't know what to say here," Ann-Marie replied, flustered. "I mean, I agree with the policy, it makes it easier to roll back if one fix is broken, but this? This is a different situation entirely."

"You'll figure something out." Without waiting for a reply, Cindy turned and walked away.

Wonderful, Ann-Marie groaned inwardly. What do I do now?

Hoping against hope that she was just misunderstanding something, that someone else could enlighten her as to what Cindy's problems were and how to give her what she wanted, Ann-Marie took a walk to Garrett's cube. Garrett was a senior developer, one who'd been useful over the past few days as she'd rooted out a few harder-to-find bugs. Surely he'd run into this issue before. Maybe he'd even have an answer?

"Ooooh, yeah. THAT policy," Garrett began, and Ann-Marie's heart sank. "Cindy gets a little OCD about this stuff. We know exactly what you're talking about. Different developers go about resolving it in different ways. I, personally, simply commit one thing in such a way that 'breaks' the other issue again. Like, in your case, I would have both included the ID column and then intentionally blanked out the ID in the details view for my first commit. That commit gets mapped to the download error JIRA ticket. Then, I commit a second change that undoes the blanked-out ID in the view, that goes to the other ticket. It leaves a sour taste in your mouth, but you get used to it."

Ann-Marie sighed, feeling a headache creeping up on the edges of her temples. "I should have just marked it a duplicate," she mumbled to herself.

"Oh, no, Cindy doesn't like that either." Garrett assured her with a sympathetic look.

"Committed a whitespace change for the second ticket?" Ann-Marie fired back, not even bothering to get her hopes up.

"She reviews every single commit. Not that she's ever been a programmer, but she's taking night classes and has a keen eye for BS. Thankfully not keen enough to catch on to what we're doing with the intentional-breakage strategy, though."

Ann-Marie sighed. "Well, that's me out of ideas."

"Sorry," Garrett replied, a gentle smile on his face. "Sometimes you just have to throw in the towel and find a loophole."

For the duration of the Bug Blitz, Ann-Marie did just that, committing 'accidental' breakages for each duplicate bug—and even, once, for a triplicate ticket.

When the blitz finished and she was offered a permanent position, she politely declined. Stability was overrated.

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