via Daily Prompt: Retrospective
A retrospective change. We throw our hands in the air, and with a deep sigh say it again, “We can push a retrospective change, do you have a P1 incident”. We have become professional application cowboys, after months of building an application, of testing, and testing and testing, somehow joining the dots seems to take a lot longer these days, than in the days of on prem, in house, on shore. Now its an in the cloud, managed solution off shore. Its no longer a box in my server room connected via Lan, but an internet enabled black box in the ether somewhere, and no one seems to care where the somewhere is, that is someone else’s problem.
So we push the retrospective change and the problem goes away… for now.
As I watch a relationship disintegrate, unable to find any one string that can begin to unravel the big ball of mess it has become, I wonder if I could push a retrospective change here. Would it be possible to identify where it all began to go wrong and raise a change request and retrospectively go back and fix it.
The harsh and angry words she said, raise a change request and go back and erase them with words of gentleness and kindness. The silence he kept, raise a change request, go back and fill the silence with words of love and forgiveness.
If we built relationships like we build applications, in an agile and concentric manner. Start with a minimum viable product, “I like you, you like me, lets have a coffee and perform a product test to see if this might work”. Hmm coffee was good, lets have another, and product test again. Yes went well, lets try a systems integration test, “You like taking long walks and reading, I like watching football and going to the pub most nights”…. nope wrong component, try again.
But we don’t, we meet with long glances across the room with a great deal of alcohol fueling the electricity. Then we end up in bed, systems integration and End to End testing before we have even started with a product test, there are no test scripts, we dont check if data is even moving between the systems, but hey it looks good and felt good… WCPGW.. what could possibly go wrong. If we are lucky its a one off and we throw the pieces in the trash the next day. If we are not.. we do lots more of SIT and E2E no test scripts in sight, and then settle down for the User acceptance testing. OH BOY do the bugs start flying then…. and 6 months in and 10 months in you look at each other and wonder what the heck you were thinking.
Come to think of it we do build relationships like we build applications. We come to the business as application gods, full of blarney selling an all singing all dancing beautiful application. We build user stories that could never be met because well, they are user stories that will be built by charming and lovely people in another country who have no way of interpreting the rash comments made by users. But we nod wisely and say YES of course we can build that. And in the drunk atmosphere of money and hope we shake hands, skip the coffee and jump into bed. What could possibly go wrong…
Papa Chronicles's meanderings 