As some colleagues and friends are telling me being a perfectionist is not healthy. Nor is knowing too much. And my latest experience at work just proved that. I was testing an integration between an application and another system where telemetry traces and metrics was sent to. I am the kind of guy that likes to understand everything and also to do things right. But for this operation, I needed help from DevOps to put in place a dedicated system where those traces were done. And while I am also a good and peaceful guy, the DevOps guy told me that he will do that but not to open another ticket in Jira or some sorts. That was a mistake as it will unveil in the next story that I am about to tell you.
Few days after I let him doing the configuration, as I got no news from him, I've decided to ask him if he progressed with it. The answer was: it is already done in same time, I just forgot to tell you. 😊 Great! Strike 1 as I've lost the time while leaving him enough breathing time to do his thing. But nevertheless I was happy enough that things are in place and I can continue the checks. So I jumped on it and resumed the integration. The result? Guess what? It didn't work. And not only that it didn't work, but next that we were supposed to do a release to the entire customer base. So who's to blame? Just myself. The solution: do it yourself!
As the DevOps guy just told me: "Hmmm, it doesn't work? I don't know why it doesn't work." At that point I understood that if I don't find a way to do it myself, I will be caught in the middle just because I agreed with him not to open a Jira Ticket and I am behind the schedule. Luckily enough I am technical enough so I configured on my own such a system where I could push data. So, I closed the activity on my side and the release was performed as scheduled. But the story doesn't finish here, there is more to it.
As the changes went live into Production, now the customer came back that they were getting errors when the system was trying to push telemetry and metrics to the external system. And of course they've opened a Jira ticket which got escalated to the Testing team. I assumed the responsibility of checking it as I already knew the context quite well. And while things are not specific to the application under test, it is still an integration issue. But this time I've detailed that I've tested it with my own configuration, but for customer specific procedures they should check with DevOps team. Thus the issue ended up to the guy that told me not to open a Jira ticket for him, forgot to tell me that he did the configuration and the configuration was wrong or something was missing.
Sometimes being willing to help somebody doesn't play as intended and you discover that the person you did the favor to, it doesn't have the same standards as you are having. As I am a perfectionist I hated this entire situation that not only brought me some stress before the release, but also after it. And the conclusion is that it is better in these times and such context to limit the responsibility to what you need to do. If I would have stick to the formal procedure, the wrong configuration could have been corrected from the initial phase and all would have been calm journey.
