So, I sat down yesterday and did my availability for June & July for work. Went through my calendar and tallied up every damn meeting, training, etc, etc, to see how many “work” hours I have – by week.

And damn if that all that NOT WORK doesn’t take up more time than I’d realized – no wonder I’m feeling over-committed. Sent it to the gal that does the bug assignments and our QC lead in the PI. He basically responded with ?!?!? – yeah, my buddy, I’ve got that much not work shit on my calendar and I’m trying to do a 40 hour week here – I didn’t sign on for 40 hours + 10 hours of meetings a week. Something has to give.

As we try to plan out our capacity for testing for the next version, I think we need to have everyone on the team do the same – I personally think we were way overcommitted for the version we’re about to release, and I don’t want that to happen again. And since we’re both on the team for the next version and the planning meetings are starting next week – maybe we can both advocate for not having a situation where the QC team is killing themselves.

We don’t get to actual capacity planning for it until July, but maybe I’ll see if he can meet one night and we can talk through it – while we’re getting better about pushing back on “No, that bug cannot be tested by the end of the month, we have too many already” (we do monthly updates), when it comes to brand new stuff, we just get hosed. And with the next version, we’re only focusing on what we can develop and test in a given month – maybe we can do better for the testing team. I think we all default to “well, we have 40 hours a week less PTO or holidays” – but we’re all starting at less than that – easily 10-20% is just gone any given week.

If nothing else, getting dragged into the planning on the next version, maybe I can be more of an advocate for QC, even though it’s technically not why I’m there. Silver linings and all that.