(no subject)

OK, NHL and NHLPA. Listen for a second.

You guys need to get your stuff together and reach an agreement. The fans deserve some sort of hockey season.

I'll even sweeten the pot. If you do, i'll go so far as to wear a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey in public, and considering that Toronto has more players who i actively dislike than any other team in the league, that's quite a statement.

C'mon, now. Swallow the egos and work this out, ok?

Beyond Pissed.

If you read daemonwolf, you know what this is about.

My workplace is adopting "Agile Development." We're starting with a trial project. Guess which one of our testers is the 'lucky' one who gets to be the victim for this horribly deformed bastard child?

Yup. You got it. Me.

But wait. It gets better. The other resources on the project are the two laziest developers, who i've had to fight for every single fucking fix on every single fucking interaction i've ever had with either of them; the DBA who seems to hate people in general and whomever darkens her door at any particular moment in specific; a PM from whom i've never seen a scrap of work and a business analyst who is so wishy-washy that she doesn't take a position on anything.

The message from on high is that we need to re-invent our process. Guess what? We had a process which worked incredibly with our maintenance team- we were the only group which was productive, and we were damned efficient. We could have done amazing things if we'd managed to make the rest of the technology department over in the image of that team and continued to foster positive relationships between development and test (basically, if lokheed or stannius said that they fixed something, almost without fail it worked perfectly, and on the rare occasions when it didn't, we worked together and figured it out.)

Oh- and the personalities in the group? They couldn't have chosen any better if they wanted a showcase of what makes a project crash and burn spectacularly. I'll be the first to say that i'm opinionated and vocal about it, that i know my job and do it well enough to have developed a degree of arrogance about it, and that i'm not particularly restrained when it comes to softening the way i say things when something is broken. Our developers in this trial are among the singularly most difficult people with whom i've ever had to interact- one is terminally lazy and intractible, the other lazy and argumentative. The DBA hates everyone with whom she's forced to work. The PM is inept, the BA is wishy-washy. In short, all the people who are doing or testing coding (myself included) are hard-asses who more often than not can be complete assholes, especially if they don't get their way; and there isn't enough competence on the other side of the equation to push back.

I have to start with this group on Thursday. Oh yeah- i own testing on a release which goes out next Thursday. I am not a happy camper. The thing i've hated about working on 'projects' with this company is having things underdocumented, and to be thrown into an environment which not only doesn't document, but prides itself on not documenting is beyond ludicrous.

Anyone want an experienced tester who can step into a situation and get the job done, whatever it takes? Whatever loyalty the company thinks it bought by the raise i got has now been more than offset by the reduction in my morale- and all but certainty that i've been tasked out to a project which has DISASTER written on it in boldface red letters a foot tall without even having my objections really given any creedance has me one very discontented employee. Having to move from a nice, dark office into an open-space 'bullpen' with the other people with whom i've been saddled- which will likely be over-lit is just the frosting on the cake,

(no subject)

Oh, yeah- and before that last half-hour of the day, it had been a great day. lokheed kicked ass and got bugs fixed, i got 'em verified; rumours circulating made it sound as if we really had a chance to reconstitute the Maintenance group, and things looked positive.

Oh, well.