Sunday, 17 June 2007

Missed it

Well the deadline came and went, and my major feature addition missed it.

And here I thought I had it all under control. The penultimate branch didn't get reviewed until Friday, and it brought up a couple of issues. One was insufficient test coverage, and while increasing the coverage, another ugly problem raised its head. It was at that stage I realised that I really had a problem. I agreed with the proposed changes that the reviewer came back with and that caused a problem. Here it was, around 11pm on Friday night and I needed to make some quite severe changes to the implementation.

While talking to the team lead I decided that there was no point landing the code as it was, and that the changes needed to be made. So I started writing them. At around 1am I realised that it was not going to be as quick as I hoped, and still had about another hour of work to fix the code, then I had to fix all the tests that I would have broken, then I would have had to go through the code and fix all the prose in the doc strings that would no have been out of date due to the changes. So I decided to head to bed.

Saturday morning and I called the project manager. It was still Friday afternoon for him. I talked him through the situation, and we decided to let the feature slide until 1.1.7.

I decided not to touch any code at all for the weekend, and step away from it all for a few days. I had been going hard out to get the whole thing written, and was quite gutted when it all sort of fell apart on the last day.

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