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Search - "testing is boring"
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Hi, I am a Javascript apprentice. Can you help me with my project?
- Sure! What do you need?
Oh, it’s very simple, I just want to make a static webpage that shows a clock with the real time.
- Wait, why static? Why not dynamic?
I don’t know, I guess it’ll be easier.
- Well, maybe, but that’s boring, and if that’s boring you are not going to put in time, and if you’re not going to put in time, it’s going to be harder; so it’s better to start with something harder in order to make it easier.
You know that doesn’t make sense right?
- When you learn Javascript you’ll get it.
Okay, so I want to parse this date first to make the clock be universal for all the regions.
- You’re not going to do that by yourself right? You know what they say, don’t repeat yourself!
But it’s just two lines.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel!
Literally, Javascript has a built in library for t...
- One component per file!
I’m lost.
- It happens, and you’ll get lost managing your files as well. You should use Webpack or Browserify for managing your modules.
Doesn’t Javascript include that already?
- Yes, but some people still have previous versions of ECMAScript, so it wouldn’t be compatible.
What’s ECMAScript?
- Javascript
Why is it called ECMAScript then?
- It’s called both ways. Anyways, after you install Webpack to manage your modules, you still need a module and dependency manager, such as bower, or node package manager or yarn.
What does that have to do with my page?
- So you can install AngularJS.
What’s AngularJS?
- A Javascript framework that allows you to do complex stuff easily, such as two way data binding!
Oh, that’s great, so if I modify one sentence on a part of the page, it will automatically refresh the other part of the page which is related to the first one and viceversa?
- Exactly! Except two way data binding is not recommended, since you don’t want child components to edit the parent components of your app.
Then why make two way data binding in the first place?
- It’s backed up by Google. You just don’t get it do you?
I have installed AngularJS now, but it seems I have to redefine something called a... directive?
- AngularJS is old now, you should start using Angular, aka Angular 2.
But it’s the same name... wtf! Only 3 minutes have passed since we started talking, how are they in Angular 2 already?
- You mean 3.
2.
- 3.
4?
- 5.
6?
- Exactly.
Okay, I now know Angular 6.0, and use a component based architecture using only a one way data binding, I have read and started using the Design Patterns already described to solve my problem without reinventing the wheel using libraries such as lodash and D3 for a world map visualization of my clock as well as moment to parse the dates correctly. I also used ECMAScript 6 with Babel to secure backwards compatibility.
- That’s good.
Really?
- Yes, except you didn’t concatenate your html into templates that can be under a super Javascript file which can, then, be concatenated along all your Javascript files and finally be minimized in order to reduce latency. And automate all that process using Gulp while testing every single unit of your code using Jasmine or protractor or just the Angular built in unit tester.
I did.
- But did you use TypeScript?37 -
Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*
We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:
- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings
Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!
*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*
Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason
*audience: ooooohhhhh*
You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.
*audience: laughs*
Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.
Backstory:
We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!
... oh to have a time machine
Working with C:
- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.
- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".
- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.
- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.
- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.
- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.
- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.
... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.
- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:
Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"
... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?
- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.
- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).
- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.
- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.
- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.
- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?
You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.
I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.
Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex20 -
Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:
practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.
Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team
It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...
<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>
Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.
So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:
- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole
So lets look at some example of their work:
- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"
- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"
- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"
- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.
- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"
Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them
Thats all the time we have for today,
Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:
- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead
See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex14 -
Most tedious part of my day...
While meetings are boring and awful and all, it's probably spinup times for me. Each and every change requires a minimum of 35 seconds of spinup to test. If i'm testing something with mailers or other daemons, that increases to easily 90+ seconds (plus the worker thread pickup times).
It's not enough time to do anything useful, and more than enough time to lose my focus. It turns every task into boring, tedious struggle. It's awful.
Apart from my coworkers, this is the single worst part about my job. (Okay, the awful code quality totally pushes this to third place.)4 -
I'm feeling like writing this down...
So today I got told off by my boss. Why? Because my job bores me.
My current title, "webmaster", is quite similar to "plumber" where I work. I fix holes on our websites, and I tell "qualified" people (external providers) how a project should be made. Nothing exciting, nothing creative, boring.
So I got told off today for being "laid-back" in a newsletter project (GDPR, looking at you) and not being thorough in my procedures of testing and configuration. Fair enough, I didn't care and I admitted it. It's a boring drag-and-drop done in literally 5 minutes, there's no added brain-value here. Plus I got told off by my IT Manager because our Exchange server would not let me receive test emails. Still doesn't work after a day. Yay.
Then she said "we're doing exciting things here, it's not always the case anywhere else you'd work". And I'm like: "really? I love writing code, seeing things coming alive, investigating why things don't run smoothly, writing efficient code (both in performance and in readability)". I hear many friend devs telling me they're doing that and what they do during their "dev-day"... All I'm doing here is "maintenance" (a.k.a boring) stuff that apparently is "exciting". Adding a <script> to handle google tag manager is hell fun, going through compiled CSS and change color values is also thrilling, finding out if a PDF handler application can handle PDF files, re-plugging a computer monitor to make it work...
I think she meant that I'm not at my place here.
Didn't want to tell her that I have no motivation in doing things I don't enjoy making, i.e, my job.
Good thing I have an interview in two weeks2 -
A bunch of testers got laid off at my company and we're facing a release. So our PM put all developers on testing with a total of 6k test cases (!).
The overall mood at the office is not good..4 -
Hmm. Seniors have the half working experience as I do and I am the only not senior one in Dev team.
I adapt code only to "taste" good for code reviewers, but they allow themselves to commit without caring and just saying :"oh unit testing is boring"
Enough with the kindergarten. Time to prepare myself for the next job.1 -
Unclogging a workflow that stretches > dozen porjects, from building to analysis of build (static / lint check etc.)… Deployment.
It's frustrating.
Touching one thing and everything falls apart.
Thus small changes, fixing the rest of workflow, testing ...
Repeat .
Going now since 1 1/2 weeks. Possibly another or two weeks more.
It is soooooooo boring tedious annoyingly frustrating slowmotion shit
-.- -
Well I consider motivation something that although is influenced by your "environment", you must seek for it. Even with the most boring/stressful/etc. situation, there must be something that makes a little change... For example, my first job was in QA testing, and I don't have anything against it, but it's simply not what I was interested... Initially my life was a little bit miserable haha, because most of my friends were already working as developers. At that time motivation was pretty low to be honest... My solution, I started learning about automation testing, that was more motivating and to be honest, a most interesting branch of testing. There I've found motivation to keep going, getting better and eventually gaining more experience to get a developer job.
-
>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met
I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?6 -
!rant, question
Hi, as a developer turned tester I was wondering if anyone here would hear a talk about what on earth testers actually do in a project and how they contribute to the product? I mean besides writing automation scripts or checking if all the requirements are met (the latter is really the most boring part of testing).
I am thinking of doing a talk on this but don't know if Devs might be interested and which conferences I should target.2 -
I have actually two, but I'll write the other one in the week.
So we had classes about software engineering. The class was interesting but the teacher wasn't. Too soft, too slow, too low, too monochord (usual french), it was boring. So we ended up not listening to him. Kinda regret this.
We got a first exam, where we were in group to develop a Test Manager for Unit Test (yep.)
We had instructions, like the note would be multiplied by the percentage of coverage of code, etc.
The thing is, we really didn't get the point of the project. Now that I think of it, it seems obvious, but it wasn't back then as it was too new. In the four people of our group, one worked real hard on it, I tried to do my best, the others too.
But like I said, I didn't get back then the point of the topic, which is to apply design pattern, unit testing, etc. It was furstating af and we ended up with a 9/20.
I got the point of the topic only for the second exam, the most classic one, on a paper sheet with questions to answer. (We were allowed only one cheatsheet, I understood the topic while doing it. Sad, huh ?)