Double-Check Everyone Else's Work?

General (non-technical) Off-Topic
#1

I’ve recently started working with a larger team, and am learning from experience that I just can’t be a great developer unto myself. Just this week 3 things have already landed on my desk that were done incorrectly by team members, and I’ve dealt with unnecessary time sinks, and wasted effort re-doing my work because of it.

  1. Server developer’s web-service was outputting malformed data that wasn’t easily recognizable which led me down some debug rabbit-trails.

  2. Administration mis-signed a document which I then submitted, awaited pending acceptance, and was eventually rejected.

  3. Designer submitted graphics with incorrect dimensions, which I was to further process, and of course I didn’t notice until a third of the way through.

Once it’s apparent that there’s a problem with the work, I succinctly express the issue, and push it back to the person responsible. But the repetitiveness of this has led me to accept that either I need to double-check work from team members, or simply get used to time sinks because we all make mistakes, and someone else along the chain is probably bemoaning mistakes in my work. I’m somewhere in the middle, wanting to smack the person, and remember to double-check their work next time.

What are your thoughts, have you experienced something similar, and how are you dealing with this in larger projects? [import]uid: 4596 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 314781[/import]

#2

Welcome to a *real* job :wink:

One reason why after years of managing this, I have settled into coding for myself and looking at beginners making the same mistakes over and over again.

That will happen in a real world, you do understand factorials, remember the chances of something that can go wrong is a factorial of the number of people involved.

cheers,

?:slight_smile: [import]uid: 3826 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 54655[/import]

#3

@jayantv

Did you ever adopt a practice of double-checking other team members work before running with it? Or did you fire everyone until it was just you coding peacefully ; ) [import]uid: 4596 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 54659[/import]

#4

Funny, but not really.

In reality, in those times (I know… it was more than 15 years ago, Early to the late 90’s) programming was different from what it is today. Techniques adopted were different. Most development was either In-house or it was database centric.

With Visual technologies (Windows 95/98/2000) development was more about getting them to create modules, that took certain parameters and either saved it to a DB or returned some results in conjunction with DB data. Unit tests were not very common, but there were tools like Mercury WinRunner that took screenshots and tried to compare areas with results.

I did get obsessively compulsive at one time in my career and it ended up with me *double checking* read that as *doing* their stuff, which is not good in any sense. I had to reschedule the team members for deployment while I sat on the code, *getting it done right* this resulted in other issues at the deployment end…

Long story short, you have to live with things, you cannot get everything done your way.

Remember it this way, you can be sober and driving fine, but the guy that hits you can be *drunk*, doesn’t mean that you drive drunk and nor can you change that situation.

Since I own my own setup, I can have the luxury of coding alone in peace, but in a company that you work, you only have so much liberty and influence, unless you are the boss, but then if you are the only one left, what happens to the outputs? productivity?

So I changed roles from being *one of them* to being the mentor/advisor, and now one glance and I can see logic errors, etc

cheers,

?:slight_smile: [import]uid: 3826 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 54663[/import]

#5

@jayantv

That was great to read, thank you. Something about it reminded me of a flavor of Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming In Code”. There are so many books on software development, and the management of software projects out there, and the approaches have changed & evolved over the lifetime of the industry. I guess it either says something about how young the industry is, or how complex software is, or maybe we’re experiencing a stage of rapid evolution. What do I know.

Lately I’ve found a greater appreciation for my own side projects, especially the ones with Corona. I love the simplicity I’ve found in Corona, outside of a bloated IDE, no clunky visual editor with windows upon windows or panels of panels of panels, along with a fairly lean & efficient library. Good stuff. [import]uid: 4596 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 54665[/import]

#6

You will need to either implement code reviews, where other developers need to test and then approve the new code before it makes it into the main line, or implement some validation tools, that in the given examples, will verify that the images and data all meet specifications before being submitted.

All the larger game studios I have been at have had some form of one or the other or some other variation of the above systems in place. [import]uid: 5317 topic_id: 14781 reply_id: 54672[/import]