@fbmac said:
@jas88 said:I have a bit of sympathy for their developers
Why the fuck someone would even think about blaming the developers for untested software? Management is responsible for business processes, and even if the entire team is incompetent the management would be responsible for fixing that.
I mean, I feel sorry for the poor sods, having their work sabotaged like that. BTDT. I've worn a QA hat and built testing stuff, I've worn a dev hat and broken stuff - and I've been "IT guy" in a software startup where that meant dealing with everything from the phone company accidentally killing the PSTN line to ... doing the quarterly sales tax (VAT) returns, because that's done using software, which makes it "IT", right? They tried hiring someone who was laid off by a bank to offload some of my workload after trying to lay me off, because obviously she'd know about accounting software ... except she'd been a mortgage sales advisor. So that bit of work came back my way after someone got suspicious about the negative sales figures that quarter... These days, I just drop in once a week to put out their latest fire. They have a great idea for the newest project, though: to "avoid" bugs, they're getting it implemented multiple times in different languages. I can't wait to see how that one turns out, as long as I don't get caught in the blast...
If I worked there, I'd be furious about being associated with buggy untested crap. It's probably how it felt to be a sysadmin somewhere like Enron: you did your job perfectly well and had nothing at all to do with the insanity higher up - but still get left with a huge steaming turd on your CV.
I like to think there was a Dilbert-like scene, with the Pointy Headed Meyer announcing that from now on all QA would be outsourced to the users since they don't need paying, and Yahbert replying "so ... you want us to expose every bug to the public as soon as it's written, now, not bother with any testing in house? OK." In a perfect world, Meyer then gets extradited to Elbonia to work as L1 tech support for a mud vendor. She's underqualified, but could probably figure out which end of the shovel is which with fewer than three guesses.
(Yes, trying to develop, manage and support a bunch of web apps with shoestring testing and never enough time to do anything "properly" is stressful, but it's also an interesting challenge to deal with. The whole setup really was designed for a DWTF article, and I'll get round to writing it one day!)