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Sometimes we engineers do a poor job of communicating complexity: we have un-communicated assumptions that we think the listening party shares. Which sometimes
by hliyan 9y ago
Sometimes we engineers do a poor job of communicating complexity: we have un-communicated assumptions that we think the listening party shares. Which sometimes lead to this:
"You could prepend the words “it’s just” to anything, it’s not going to change the fact that you sound completely ignorant and will ignore any challenges that your team communicates to you."
I have often found it effective to counter "just-justifications" with the right representation of complexity. E.g.
"Yes, it's just an API change, but it requires 50 new test cases and impacts 120 existing test cases",
OR
"Yes, it's just a library change, but there are 450 sites in our code that use the library and out of those, 50 involve financial calculations"
Almost always, the manager appreciates this because you would have brought to his attention a problem that would otherwise gone under his radar.
- rnd33 9y ago> "Yes, it's just an API change, but it requires 50 new test cases and impacts 120 existing test cases", "See, that's exactly why we shouldn't write any/so many tests!" - A product owner I know...
- jlg23 9y agoHe might have a point if a simple API-change impacts 170 test cases. This sounds suspiciously like "no functional tests but let's go for 100% coverage with unit tests" - not necessarily the efficient thing to do, from a management perspective.
- dasil003 9y ago"Manual QA then? That will be even slower than automated..."
- sidlls 9y agoThat product owner might have a good point. Far too many engineers I know think 100% coverage is a reasonable goal and spend way too much time writing unit tests that don't add much value or worse add negative value.
- denzil_correa 9y ago> Sometimes we engineers do a poor job of communicating complexity: we have un-communicated assumptions that we think the listening party shares. IMO, a manager should understand the complexity of the work of his employee at an approx. ball park level.