4 ms·
That boss' demand would be right probably 99% of time. And getting it fixed by a hardware partner without concrete evidence would be unlikely to be successful.
by defaultname 5y ago
That boss' demand would be right probably 99% of time. And getting it fixed by a hardware partner without concrete evidence would be unlikely to be successful.
- Jtsummers 5y agoIt would have been right to notify the hardware partner that we believed we'd found an issue but were investigating on our end. He did not, in fact he forbade mentioning it in any meeting with them. We had good evidence that it was a hardware issue (No issue and then a new hardware revision and then the issue appeared. There had been some software changes, but none that should have impacted this). The problem was we couldn't say it with enough confidence to satisfy him, he wanted absolute proof and he did believe that CS people were incapable of identifying a hardware issue (a statement he'd made on multiple occasions). This literally resulted in spending an extra million or more to finish the project late. It was not the right call to delay several months before reporting it to the partner. It took them another 3+ months to develop a fix and we couldn't progress on the software in that time because it was not working correctly. We could make it "work" in that it would send the correct data but it was too slow to operate within the protocol specs (so the whole system would fail, hitting time limits that caused resets and test failures), or we could pray that all the correct data made it which it would 7 times out of 10. But that 30% (or more) failure rate meant that we couldn't reliably determine when a failure was in our software or the hardware.