Beam me up scotty!

Its been an exciting week. I finally got my code out of development and into the hands of QA. The HaHa gave me some serious re-work to make sure that Ops would sign off on the design. I was also super lucky that Dave did not make me go through the new HoMo process, but I'm looking forward to my first one of those.

So basic sanity testing is done, mocked up all the backend external interfaces so that QA can inject the bad and the good. Provided a front end mock for the Applications teams so they can build without the need for having the whole software stack. All looking sweet. All very test driven development, all very agile.

Next step was to get Engineering Services to deploy to a QA environment in the lab. Mother-of-Jesus what an episode that turned out to be and we are still not finished.

Here's what I had to do. A few months ago I had to submit an email which Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir approved. This then got translated onto a cocktail napkin (I'm not joking). This was then pinned to the wall in some sort of timeline sequence, an agile planning wall so to speak. I'm not sure what happens when they reach the end of the wall, they must wrap around or go back to the beginning or something.

Then, I had to attend another daily standup with what's left of PMO. Each day I had to say the following, "Yes, I'm on track and still need the environment". It would have been easier to tell them when I was not on track, but they guy who runs the team wants to "look you in the eye".

Then it came to the day-of-deployment. This basically meant hanging around all day with the services guys. The head guy, known as Beam-Me-Up banged away at his ASUS all day, swearing a lot and then shouting for another Diet Dr. Pepper. I did not like to ask what was going on, but basically if I attempted to get up he said "Leave and I fucking nuke this environment". I mean dude, chill out!

That was three days ago. I'm still at his desk, Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir is pissed, he thinks he could have deployed in seconds. I mean that guys is the bomb, I'm sure he could have done it in at least 30 minutes. Its been whack-a-mole, fix one thing and it breaks another. Beam-Me-Up says this is normal.

If I don't get the environment I may loose my QA team and miss the release window. If that happens, then I may not get to deliver this side of Memorial Day, the schedule is backed up with American City Bank work. F**k me, this shit is hard!

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 0 (no more drinking!)
Shots : 0 (no more drinking!)
Dinner : 0 nights (no more dinners!)
Weight : 184 lbs

PMO have vanished!

Its true. I did not pick up on the vibe. Its was all a bit "I know What You Did Last Summer". First Tori, one of Henry's super,super lieutenants just disappeared. It turns out, and the story was very confusing for a while, that she decided to leave her partner, move out to Yuma, AZ and live with Henry. See I got you. Not our Henry, but one of the board members that is also called Henry.

There was this totally wild story that went around that you had to be called Henry to get on the board, until Henry then appointed some kid (literally) from Gunn High School in Palo Alto to the board by the name of Frank and not our Euro-fool Frank!

Back to PMO. So Tori disappears. Then I noticed that my stand ups became bearable. SCRUM is cool, you have "cows" and "farmers". Basically the cow is committed to delivering the beef jerky and the farmer makes all the money. Generally the engineers and product managers are "cows" and PMO are the "farmers". They get to say "told you so" when there plans all get f**ked up because, well the unexpected happens. Its not like we are building the new bay bridge and its all a totally known science. I'm totally jealous of those types of engineers, everything always seems to go to plan for them.

Our stand ups are characterized by the PMO types asking the same question over and over again. I swear, you could record them and it would be word for word every friggin' day. And then there were none. They just vanished like it had all been a bad dream. Click your heals and return to Kansas. All very cool.

I'm sure that Constantine is working on some new engineering lead process. That's going to be cool, lets the engineers run the engineering process. Totally makes sense.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 8 (up 2 from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (5 x pizza)
Weight : 184 lbs

Agile, omg!

I don't want to complain. Its been a long few months of design, code, re-design, re-code to get this Shopping Cart feature done. Its a pretty challenging task, even for somebody as capable as me. But I'm so totally over the Project Managers (PMO) and their f**king "agile" process. I mean, what's so agile about having to stand up and talk for 15 minutes and then spend 60 because they can't read a friggin' clock and keep a meeting on schedule. I mean, I get the whole peer programming, SCRUM and all of those things. I've working in some cool paces where it works. But at Hank, my god its out of friggin' control and its so not agile.

He's the scenario. You get the first "Oh shit" when you see somebody in a pencil skirt or a sport coat enters the circle. You just know that we will have to go over the same basic stuff that we did in yesterdays standup. You know, what the status on line item X. Its all in friggin' VersionOne you dumb ass! Then, there is some bogus check list that we have to complete before the Operations team will even consider staging the code. Then don't get me started with the QA pass rate and execution rate all added to bug burndowns... I need a break, thank god for Burning Man this weekend...

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 4 bottles (up 2 from last week)
Shots : 2 x Bourbon Shots (2 up from last week)
Dinner : 5 nights (3 x Pizza, 2 x Indian)
Weight : 180 lbs