Principles of Software Development / BWE

In which our Hero realizes that he may have ended last time on a cliff-hanger and figures to close the loop

The “gate” process straight from the textbook. In the “Waterful” design model, software goes through phases, Requirements, Design, Development, Testing, and Production. And between each phase, the team stops to say, “Go” or “No Go,” based on how things look so far.

Of course, the working team is the one doing the work, so they are biased and that means there needs to be a review team who can check over everything. Except they need to be senior or the working team will ignore them. So now we’re meeting with people more important than us to ask them to bless the project.

And that means getting a lot of senior people into a room at the same time, and they’re all showing how senior and executive they are by having lots of meetings so we have to book well in advance. Most of them don’t actually care about the meeting but are technically affected because we’re using the same server that they do, or we’re adding something to the work schedule. Whatever. The *real* implication is that the meeting isn’t booked until the team is sure of their line to success. And by the time the actual review meeting happens, at least half of the people in the room have already gotten led by the hand through the project. (Which is a good thing because then we can answer their questions and make sure they understand and are comfortable with the project.)

Of course, that makes the gate meeting profoundly anticlimactic. The team asking for permission won’t be there without having completed everything that’s been asked for. The team giving permission won’t be there without having been consulted in detail so that there are no surprises.

So the entire multi-hour exercise, in reality, is pointless. By the time the meeting happens, everybody has already said yes. The only thing really remaining is to find out what people haven’t been saying. That’s the actual stress of the meeting. Not “Yes” or “No,” but what didn’t someone tell us, what lurking gotcha, or secret agenda, or brobdingnagian travail that has been left unmentioned and now lies stretching and yawning in R’lyeh and scratching it’s stomach thinking about a bite of reality to eat.

Make the production the must uncertain sure-thing I get to experience. It’s a done deal, but it’s not a done-deal till it’s done. And it’s a high stress done deal, because if it isn’t done, then they’ll be looking for people to blame. And I’m the guy who has “so they can blame me” in the implied section of my job description.

In any case, we got our go-ahead. As HARLIE would say, Now we have to build the damned thing.

One of the reasons I didn’t want to go to that meeting was because we’ve had these big organizational shifts and the new VP that owns the organization that’s hired me is a bit of a martinet. Authoritarian, micro-managing by nature and extra focused because she’s taking over a new organization, and so the general advice we’d been given as contractors was to stay out of her way for the time being because she didn’t have the history to know why we were valuable and we didn’t want to look anything other than valuable.

But I’m invited to this meeting and while they try to keep the group small, they also invite the technical leads in case there are deeper questions that the managers can’t answer. As much as I hate meetings, I make a point to go to these meetings mostly just because then it reinforces their unconscious perception of my own seniority because of course Serin is here, he’s a heavy hitter. So I can’t not go, but it goes in the face of keeping my head down.

We’d never met, but she came in like thunder across the sky. Confident and loud and pretty and blond. On personality alone, I’ll put five bucks in her being CEO, here or somewhere else. And she looked at the room, zeroed in on me and said, “We haven’t met,” and suddenly I’m not just a mouse in the room with the cat but actually shaking hands and introducing myself by name.

She’s… a character. There is a vast and dire conflict between what I’ve been told about her and what I’ve seen of her. In person, she’s energetic and excited, cheerleading the troops and joking around. I’d file her in my stereotype drawer under “Sorority Sister.” Except that she’s a senior leader and that doesn’t happen without tenacity. And discounting the actual personality judgements, I’ve seen the changes in our work that she’s asked for and dealt with requests for information that started with her and so I know that she’s not exactly insincere in her character, but that it’s the Winnie-the-Pooh face to what remains a bear, with teeth and claws.

She makes me uncomfortable. I haven’t resolved the gap between the micromanaging perfectionist and the care-free bonhommie of the party-girl at the head of the meeting-room table. And I’ve met more than a few of her predecessors, male and female, and never felt this kind of disconnection from them.

She makes me uncomfortable. Also because after the meeting, she whooped loudly (possibly cool) and then decided she had to give our female project manager a hug. Which may be socially okay between women but it made me uncomfortable as a bystander and makes me cringe at the thought of her ever doing that to me. There have been colleagues I’d have hugged, male or female, but it’s rare, and it’s not for a business setting like this.