How many bad things can you spot in the following quote? “We don’t need Q.A., we can just release the software without testing, and if it goes wrong we will send our programmers on-site to show the clients that we are on the case.” Does that sound like your manager? Then you need to read the Bad Managers FAQ and the other stories on bad-managers.com.
Employees of my former employer will take heart that they are not the only people in the world forced to be “team players”, and that such talk is always code for “we don’t know what we’re doing but we’re doing it anyway.”
To be fair, my former employer did many things right: they had excellent QA personnel and an insanely great system architect, for example. Their biggest problem was time management and an inability to stand up to customers with insane requirements. Compare that to my current job, where we have no QA personnel at all (although we do have an excellent system architect). I also have a manager who is convinced that functional testing can be eliminated through a complex combination of automated unit testing and other Extreme Programming techniques. (More on Extreme Programming later. Much more. Much later.)
§
I am no longer accepting public comments on this post, but you can use this form to contact me privately. (Your message will not be published.)
§
© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim