As we're wrapping up the final stages of a cycle, going into the last week of crunch, I've been trying to get the final touches on many things finished and out of the way so I can breath a sigh of relief and move on to a new job. However, I've noticed a few things that have piqued my interest, and wondered if this is just something in our group of developers, or if it's a bit more universal.

I was heavily involved in the design phase of this project. Knowing that the poor folks who both write our documentation (we fondly call it "fiction" ;-}) and compile the test scenarios to write the test plans will base their work on what I write, I try to focus on everything from the user's perspective. I think this is the only common language I have with everyone, as no one, except the coworker who is tasked with actual implementation, will care about data structures, APIs, and the like. (The obvious exception is the one set of APIs we're publicising for others to use.)

As I got away from all that, implementation was well underway, so I went to start testing the implementations against the spec. And I found some egregious errors. Program parameters that weren't even close to doing the right thing, output that didn't quite match what it was supposed to (i.e., unreadable), and, mortal sin of mortal sins, output that wasn't properly translation-enabled (we support 29 languages - over 50% of our business is non-English - and, dealing with China and France both mean that not a lick of English can appear anywhere when those languages are enabled).

So, over the last few weeks, I've opened a half-dozen or so defects. And over the last couple days, I've rewritten large swaths of code (mostly in shell - I'm looking forward to a relocatable perl in hopes of rewriting these very shell scripts!), in the hopes of meeting the spec as it has (now) been documented, thus how the end user will eventually expect it to work.

I realise that, in an ideal environment, there would be ample time to ensure that every developer fully understood not only his or her tasks to perform, but how those cogs fit into the bigger wheel, based on the specs. But I know I don't work in that ideal environment, so I'm guessing most other monks don't, either. In practical terms, I'm coming to the conclusion that either a) it's not realistic to expect everything that is checked in to version control meets all specifications it is intended to, especially not on the first attempt, or b) my team isn't quite as good as I thought they were. I'm not quite sure which - both explanations seem to explain the situation, so I'm looking for more insight. Is this something to really concern myself with, or am I just now finding an area that I need to concentrate on, or perhaps a bit of both?

In reply to Design. Implement. Bug Report. by Tanktalus

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