RFCs, test findings and socially disabled ICT people

[Mich the Tester]

Fixing stuff usually takes time and costs money, so it's a question of who gets blamed for the project being late and going over budget.

Not fixing stuff costs more. The system is supposed to provide a return on investment; anything that gets in the way of that is very expensive. Yes, the builder wants to know he'll be paid for changes, but I'm talking about a collection of cosmetic issues that would take no more than a few hours to solve, but which would create the goodwill needed for the acceptant to sign off while accepting workarounds for some more serious issues. It's childishness on both sides and I'm trying not to get involved.

[SupremeSpod]

Not fixing stuff costs more. The system is supposed to provide a return on investment; anything that gets in the way of that is very expensive. Yes, the builder wants to know he'll be paid for changes, but I'm talking about a collection of cosmetic issues that would take no more than a few hours to solve, but which would create the goodwill needed for the acceptant to sign off while accepting workarounds for some more serious issues. It's childishness on both sides and I'm trying not to get involved.

Show me signed customer approval and you can have your changes. I'll drop what I'm currently working on. Btw, after the changes, we'll have to perform our unit testing again, ensure that our version numbers are updated in the read-me file, rebaseline the code. Deliver to Integration, they'll have to perform full regression testing.

And after all that when you or any other self-righteous f**ker who reckons it'll take "only a couple of minutes" to change back we'll do it all again.

Hey, happy invoicing everyone.

[NickFitz]

Oh well, shall send an invoice for telling my tester not to bother discussing the merits of a minor adjustment to a sentence.

The other year I worked on an online voting system for some music awards where a minor, last-minute change to one sentence caused about 30% of users to enter their votes in the "Other" field, rather than selecting their chosen candidate directly. As the general public can't spell to save their lives (quite a few of them spelt "Mika" incorrectly, ffs) it wasn't practical to detect this automagically, so somebody had to manually check thousands of votes and allocate them to the correct artist, all against a very tight deadline.

Poetic justice: that somebody was the person who had changed the sentence

[Mich the Tester]

Show me signed customer approval and you can have your changes. I'll drop what I'm currently working on. Btw, after the changes, we'll have to perform our unit testing again, ensure that our version numbers are updated in the read-me file, rebaseline the code. Deliver to Integration, they'll have to perform full regression testing.

And after all that when you or any other self-righteous f**ker who reckons it'll take "only a couple of minutes" to change back we'll do it all again.

Hey, happy invoicing everyone.

Ah, but your last line sums up why all this is a load of bollox. We're all going to be paid anyway.

[SupremeSpod]

Ah, but your last line sums up why all this is a load of bollox. We're all going to be paid anyway.

[doodab]

Not fixing stuff costs more.

In the long run, you may be right, but it won't make the project late and over budget.

[original PM]

In the long run, you may be right, but it won't make the project late and over budget.

and thats the key isn't it.

Is the most important part delivering a software package that works or ensuring the project is delivered to (estimated) timescales and (estimated) costs

obvious when you think about it but unfortunately we live in a world where dick ed's generally rule....

[doodab]

and thats the key isn't it.

Is the most important part delivering a software package that works or ensuring the project is delivered to (estimated) timescales and (estimated) costs

obvious when you think about it but unfortunately we live in a world where dick ed's generally rule....

And oddly they aren't usually the people that write the software or the ones that have to use it.

Although personally I would blame a system that fails to allow for human weakness rather than the individuals themselves.