by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/07/12 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/07/12/10329116.aspx
Yesterday, in The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 25: Something old, something new, something repurposed, and something..., I talked about
Left out was something blue, because I couldn't think of anything we added that was blue.
Then I thought about it.
I am!
And not in this sense. Or in this one. Or even this one, either. Not even this one!
But I was thinking.
About how we did a huge review of all of the locale data, and fixed literally thousands of bugs.
And when I say thousands, I mean really high thousands.
Now if you ask a tester, they will say that even a good developer will sometimes not fix a bug right. And thus out of every ten bugs they fix, they could easily see one or two reactivated.
Our per capita bug percentages due to mistakes were more along the lines of one or two for every few hundred bugs.
And I when I say hundreds, I mean really high hundreds.
But even so, and even though most of them were found and fixed, there were a few that came back to us too late to fix which are incredibly painful.
And then there was the decision to not have any kind of preview screen for the lock screen or TDBN in Regional Options or the Language Profile -- even though these were the places where the change would be caused. No one wanted to add that UI.
And the difficulty that the tester who was charged with making sure the lock screen and the TDBN used analogous formats when the people initially tasked with giving us the lock screen and reviewing the monthday for each locale never knew they were supposed to be related. I would have been happy to tell them, but I didn't know either.
I feel like sending Paola kudos just so she knows I appreciated the efforts!
And the last push to make them both the same that introduced a bug because for a single locale one was wrong and one was right and we decided wrong which one should win -- yet again it is too easy to focus on the one that is wrong two times rather than hundreds that are right two times.
And remember The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 1 (Some people don't want to double-d's)? Well, pressure was brought to bear and a lot of reviewers freaked out about not conforming to the new look and they took out those leading zeroes. Some of them have been put back for locales where other reviewers put their feet down and the reviewers admitted it looked more natural with the leading zeroes. But I have lost some sleep about the ones that may still be wrong, and have caused one of those people on the core feature team to lose some sleep too, I think. But it is quite easy to blame here too, if one is me.
Now I've talked to my girlfriend about this -- and Claudia agreed with my tentative assumption/worry -- that it is outright narcissism to take all of this and blame it on me (and no one else), when even a rudimentary RCA (root cause analysis) has me often doing little more than checking in someone else's efforts.
Plus the bugs that were typos that could be more directly ascribed to me actually were found and fixed!
So I will tentatively try to stop feeling guilty here.
The work is solid, the product is solid, there ia a lot to be proud of.
Though I have enough empathy to not be pleased for the sake of a few customers who may ultimately be a little less happy.
So I'm blue....
Well, at least now we have something old, new, borrowed/repurposed, and blue. So the "bride" can get hitched!