The Unicorn Project

by Gene Kim

  They tell her about the projects they’re working on, which provides a shared context. Then she asks what they find most frustrating about the testing process.

  The flood gates open. Their pain points and stories sound all too familiar to her: waiting for environments, environments not completely cleaned up, the problems that cascade when something goes wrong, the inability to determine whether problems were caused by errors in the code or something wrong with the environment.

  Suddenly, she and Tom have lots of common ground and things to talk to them about. After all, everyone loves complaining about work. Maxine starts taking notes. And thus, the party gets fully underway.

  After ninety minutes, it’s clear to Maxine that it isn’t really about Dev versus QA—instead, it’s about how Phoenix business requirements change so often, which almost always requires urgent code changes. This reduces the time available for testing, resulting in poorer quality, as evidenced by the latest Phoenix disaster.

  Everyone understands that change is a part of life, but the Phoenix Project seems ill-suited to this rapid pace of change. And everyone, absolutely everyone, expresses real concerns about the decreasing quality of the Phoenix Project and the potential consequences to Parts Unlimited. Someone says, “In his Town Halls, Steve talks about what’s needed from us. We’re just not delivering what’s needed—and when we find something wrong, there’s not enough time to fix it.”

  There’s lots of enthusiasm about the feature freeze, despite the ambiguity of what exactly will be frozen. People are excited that this indicates a real change of values from the top, and it’s definitely for the better. However, many managers are convinced they’re somehow exempt from the freeze.

  Eventually, the party moves to the lunchroom and fifteen large pizzas of every imaginable variety are on the tables. The smell makes Maxine hungry—she’s feeling a bit jittery from eating all those donuts; her heart is racing, and she’s even sweating a bit. As a borderline hypoglycemic, she needs to eat some protein soon or she’ll have a headache and a serious blood sugar crash.

  By now, scores of QA people have arrived. Maxine doesn’t really know who is supporting Data Hub and who isn’t, but she doesn’t care. The goal is to make friends today. A bouncer at the door would have squashed that.

  Maxine finishes her second slice of pepperoni pizza and throws away the paper plate in the compost bin. After carefully washing her hands, she follows Purna to her desk. Purna has happily agreed to show Maxine how she performs her daily work. Maxine sees rows of desks packed more closely together than in the developer area, but not as dense as the helpdesk area where she met Derek.

  On Purna’s desk are two large monitors, pictures of her with her kids, and a bottle of eight-year-old single malt scotch. Maxine gestures at it, “Your favorite?”

  Purna laughs, saying, “Not even close, but good enough for celebrations here. You need it working on the Phoenix Project.” She moves windows around her screen and shows Maxine the release project that she has created in the QA ticketing tool.

  At last, Maxine thinks. She’s been dying to see the QA team workflow. When Maxine sees the tool, she is momentarily taken aback.

  “Is that IE6?” Maxine asks, hesitantly. The last time she saw that version of Internet Explorer was in Windows XP.

  Purna smiles, as if she’s used to having to explain this to people. “Yes. We’ve been using this tool for over a decade, and now we have to run the client inside of an old Windows VM. It contains all our test projects and runs some of our automated functional tests. There’s thousands of test plans that we’ve built over ten years in here.”

  “But IE6?” Maxine asks.

  “The vendor has an upgrade that supports a modern browser, but it requires upgrading the server it runs on,” Purna says. “We finally got budget for it, but we’re still waiting for Operations to provision it.”

  This isn’t the first time Maxine has seen people having to use old versions of Internet Explorer. They had some plant support systems back at her old position where the vendor went out of business long ago. They’ve managed to migrate off of those systems, with one exception. They had to create a completely air-gapped network called “6.6.6.6” for a mission-critical server. It was running on a known vulnerable version of SunOS, which was completely unpatchable.

  Good times, she thinks.

  As Purna gives her a tour, Maxine sees that despite its age, the QA workflow application is very well-organized and functional.

  Purna pulls up a network share with over two hundred Word documents containing test plans. When Maxine asks, she opens up a couple at random. Some describe the test procedure to test a given user scenario: go to this URL, fill out this form with these values, click this button, verify correct values at this other URL …

  Other documents describe the test plan for input validation, to ensure that every field in each form rejects any non-conforming input. Reading these brings back memories from decades ago for Maxine. After all, her first job was doing software QA. Great QA requires a perverse and sometimes sadistic intuition for what will cause software to blow up, crash, or endlessly hang.

  Maxine once heard a joke: “A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders zero beers. Orders 999,999,999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders negative one beer. Orders a ‘sfdeljknesv.’”

  Great QA people are notoriously good at breaking other people’s code. They’ll fill in forms with thousands of characters, unprintable Unicode characters and emojis, put negative numbers into date fields, and other wildly unexpected things. As a result, programs crash or wildly malfunction, usually causing developers to slap their foreheads, marveling at the diabolical test case.

  Some of these injection errors can be used by hackers to gain complete access and potentially grab all the data from the entire system. This is what led to some of the worst personally identifiably information (or PII) thefts in history.

  Finding these errors and vulnerabilities is very important work. Maxine feels awful that Purna and her team must manually perform them. During the next two weeks, how many times will they clean up from the previous test, bring up a fresh Phoenix application state, go to the right URL, type the same information into the fields …?

  Purna shows other tests to check whether the feature actually worked as designed. Often, this means connecting it with other business systems in an integrated test environment carefully engineered to resemble what is currently running in production.

  Maxine keeps thinking about how many of these great tests could be automated. It would liberate the QA teams from work that is tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone, and free up their genius to find more ways to break the code.

  Moreover, these automated tests would be run every time a developer checks in code, giving fast and immediate feedback that Maxine and other developers love. They could find mistakes right away and not make the same mistake day after day, week after week.

  Maxine doesn’t say any of this aloud. The last thing a QA person wants to hear from a developer they just met is their ideas on how to automate their job away.

  Nearly an hour later, Maxine is still eagerly taking notes. Purna is being so nice, but Maxine feels impatient. She’s here to see her code run and help the QA team make sure it’s correct.

  Purna turns to her and says, “Well, that’s about all we can do. The QA1 environment still hasn’t been reset. We’re waiting on a customer test data set from the Data Warehouse team, and the Phoenix Dev teams still haven’t started their merge … until we get those, there’s really nothing we can do.”

  “The developers haven’t started merging?” Maxine says, her heart sinking. “How long does that take?”

  “We usually get something within two or three days … I know they’re always trying their best …” says Purna.

  Maxine groans. In her short tour of duty with the Phoenix Project, she’s experienced almost every side of a ticket transaction. To get a Phoenix build going, she opened up tickets
to what felt like half of the QA and Operations organization and waited helplessly while they worked to get the things she needed.

  She enjoyed working on some Data Hub development tickets, because they represented things that their customers needed. They marked them for QA as “ready to test,” and now that she’s hanging out in QA, she discovers that QA is waiting on work still being done back in Dev.

  And they’re also waiting for other people to vacate the test environments they need to use. They’re waiting for Ops to provision a server so they can upgrade their test management system. And they’re waiting for refreshed test data from the Data Warehouse team. Where does all this madness end?!

  “What exactly do you need from the Data Warehouse team?” she asks, reminded of Brent’s data problems during the Phoenix release and Shannon describing her five frustrating years on that team.

  “Oh, everyone waits for them,” she says. “They’re responsible for getting data from almost everywhere in the company, and cleaning and transforming it so that it can be used by other parts of the business. We’ve been waiting almost a year for anonymized customer data, and we still don’t have test data that includes recent products, prices, and active promotions. We always get pushed down the priority list, so our test data is years old.”

  Interesting, Maxine thinks. Data Hub is actually how the Data Warehouse team receives most of its data.

  More and more dependencies, as far as the eye can see, she thinks. There is no place in this whole screwed-up system where you can get anything done. It doesn’t matter whether you’re creating the ticket, processing the ticket, waiting on the ticket, or working the ticket. It doesn’t matter. You’re trapped in a web of dependencies, completely unable to get anything done, no matter where you are.

  “This sucks,” Maxine says finally, sighing loudly. “I just hate all this waiting …”

  “Actually, it’s much better than it used to be,” Purna says. This makes Maxine feel even worse.

  Purna stares at Maxine. Maxine feels like she needs to explain why she’s upset: “I’m pissed off that Dev doesn’t have their crap together. We’ve got to do better than this,” Maxine finally blurts out.

  “I know we sometimes contribute to the problem too,” Purna says.

  Oh, great, Maxine thinks. On top of everything else, we’re also suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

  Just then, she hears a loud commotion in the lunchroom behind her. A tall man in his early fifties is angrily yelling at Charlotte and pointing at the pizzas and then at Tom and the other Data Hub developers.

  Uh oh. That must be Roy, she thinks. She quickly texts a note to Kurt:

  Roy is here. You’d better come!

  “Excuse me,” she says to Purna, walking quickly to the kitchen.

  “… we can’t have people here disrupting and interfering with our work. Of course, I certainly appreciate the gesture, but this should have gone through me. Next time, get my approval first, Charlotte!”

  “Oh, but it just seemed like such a nice gesture,” Charlotte responds. “I mean, donuts and pizza! No one has ever done that for QA before. What a very nice thing for Kurt to do.”

  “Kurt! Kurt’s always up to something. This is just part of some scheme he’s hatching,” Roy fumes, waving his clipboard at everyone. Watching the scene are about fifteen people standing motionless, eyes wide. Some look frightened; some look amused.

  “He’s probably put all this food on my department code!” Roy says, turning back to Charlotte. “If so, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  Maxine strides confidently into the lunchroom, extending her hand. “Hi, Roy. I’m Maxine, one of the developers on the Data Hub team. I’m sorry. This is all my fault. It was my idea to bring in donuts this morning. I just wanted to celebrate Testing Day with you and offer our help.”

  Roy shakes Maxine’s extended hand but looks blankly at her. He finally asks, “To celebrate what?”

  “Testing Day,” Maxine says simply, unable to stop smiling. Roy’s expression is nearly identical to Tom’s when she brought up Testing Day to him earlier that morning. “I’ve had so much fun working on the features for Data Hub that I thought it would be just as fun to offer our help to test the code too.”

  Maxine points behind her to the conference room whiteboard, which everyone can see from the lunchroom, especially the big, pink hearts that Charlotte drew.

  Roy looks at her, speechless. Finally, he releases her hand and says loudly, “Oh, no you don’t. I don’t know what you all are up to,” pointing at Maxine and Tom and five other Data Hub developers who stand out in their T-shirts and hoodies. “I’m pretty sure Kurt is up to no good, as usual. This is probably some empire-building scheme he’s running, now that he’s trumped up a position for himself in Development. I’ll get to the bottom of this, you can count on that.”

  As Roy turns to go, Maxine wonders how she can reiterate her message of “we come in peace.”

  As she tries to decide what to do, she sees Kurt stride into the room. “Oh, hello, Roy! I’m so glad you’re still here. Sorry for not coordinating with you. We just thought it would be fun to throw a surprise party. QA is the next critical part of the chain, and we want to do whatever we can to help.”

  At the sound of Kurt’s voice, Roy turns around, his face red. “Oh, ho, here he is! I’d like to have a word with you. Right now, please.”

  Kurt is about to respond when Kirsten walks into the room behind him, saying, “Hi, Kurt. Hi, Roy. Mind if I join you all? Oh, I love pizza.”

  Maxine is surprised to see Kirsten. Other people are wandering into the lunchroom, watching the drama unfold.

  “I’m so glad you could make it, Kirsten.” Kurt turns to everyone, “As we were walking here, we were talking about how important the QA effort is and that QA’s concerns deserve a bigger voice. Kirsten, would you mind sharing what you told me? I think everyone here would love to hear it.”

  “Of course, Kurt,” Kirsten says, holding a paper plate with a slice of sausage and pineapple pizza. “As everyone knows, the Phoenix Project is the most important initiative in the history of the company. The disaster two weeks ago was a big eye-opener for everyone, especially at the most senior levels of this company. We have a lot riding on the next release. We have three years of promises that we’ve made to the marketplace that we’re finally starting to fulfill.

  “We just announced Project Inversion, the first time we’ve had a feature freeze to shore up quality,” she continues. “This is a demonstration of the commitment, at the highest levels of the company, not just to do the right things, but to do the right things right. And getting you a code release on time is part of that. I know Development is often late merging their changes.

  “In our meeting with all the Dev and QA leadership, they gave their commitment to deliver you something to test by five today,” she says. “We know how important it is that you have something stable to test, and that needs great development processes. Improving those processes will be a part of Project Inversion, as well.”

  People cheer, the QA staff clapping especially loudly.

  “We’re in a relay race, and we need to get the baton handed to you,” she continues, gesturing expansively with her free hand. “Your work is important, and my job is to help you get whatever you need to succeed. Thank you in advance for all your hard work, and please let me know how I can help.” The room erupts in applause again, and Maxine joins in. She’s reminded of a fancy party she was at in Chicago, where she saw the mayor of the city address the room. She was amazed at how gifted of a communicator he was, making everyone not only feel comfortable, but appreciated and part of something special.

  Kirsten has that gift too, Maxine thinks. She’s never seen this side of Kirsten before and is impressed.

  The crowd starts to dissipate, and several people make their way to Kirsten. Others approach Kurt, shaking his hand, congratulating him on his new role.

  Roy is at the back of the lunchroom, glaring
at Kirsten and Kurt.

  At that moment, Charlotte appears beside her. “Life is always interesting around Kurt, isn’t it? I’m going to introduce myself to Kirsten. I’ve always wanted to meet her. She’s so cool. We’ve had so many interesting people visit us here in QA today!”

  Maxine sees Roy approach Kurt. She inches over so she’s just close enough to hear him say, “… This isn’t over. You somehow managed to find a patron, but she won’t be able to protect you forever. You think you’re better than us? You think you can come in here, put on airs, and automate everyone’s job away? Not on my watch. I’ll make sure we bring you down.”

  Roy strides out of the room. Maxine looks at Kurt, who has an unconcerned smile on his face. He says to Maxine and Tom, who just joined her, “Well, that was fun. Don’t worry about a thing. I saw that coming a mile away.”

  “Worried?” Tom responds, laughing. “I’m not worried about anything. This is more exciting than your average day coding. What’s going to happen next?”

  “Apparently, developers merging their code in a hurry to make a five o’clock deadline,” Maxine says, deadpan.

  Tom’s smile quickly disappears. “Let’s go watch.” Kurt smiles.

  CHAPTER 10

  • Monday, September 29

  Over the decades, Maxine has tried to explain to non-technical people how frightening code merges are. Her best description is having fifty screenwriters simultaneously working on a Hollywood script when they haven’t decided who the main characters are, or what the ending will be, or whether it’s a gritty, detective story or a bumbling sleuth with a sidekick.

  They break up the writing responsibilities between all the writers, and each writer works on their part of the script in isolation, typing away in Word for weeks at a time. Then, right before the script needs to be finalized, all fifty writers get together in a room to merge all their work back together into a single story.

  Of course, any attempt to merge their scripts together is a disaster. There’s still no agreement on who the main characters are, there’s hundreds of extraneous characters, completely disconnected scenes, and gaping holes in the plot … just to name a few of the problems..