Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female.

that I am awake and semi-functioning for the 7:30AM meeting. GO ME.

Then the 8AM meeting. Hoo boy that is gonna be fun. A higher up had the FUCKING AUDACITY to IM me at 10 last night suggesting we skip the meeting because we still don’t have design documents – um, no, how about we have the meeting and someone explain why we don’t have design documents. I’m not gonna be bitchy about it, but we need to at least identify what the design logjam *is* so we have half a chance at fixing it. Call me crazy, but I would prefer not to ignore the fact that we’re missing critical shit.

This project needs a disaster recovery manager – personally, I think we need to cut some of these features from the version *now* and put them in the next one, so we can really focus on what we can do in this version and do it well. But, I don’t think I’m empowered to do that… So, I will be asking today – what is the drop dead date where we decide “no, if we don’t have a design, we don’t go forward with this now” – and see if we can’t get the idea in folks heads that we can’t commit to items we don’t have designs for.

I mean, I already am pretty sure it’s gonna be, “oh no, these all have to go in this next version” and it’s gonna take forever to get the design done and we’re gonna be overcommitted and in crunch mode this fall, but I can try.

What is killing me is that I’m going to in there, be a pain in the ass, maybe accomplish nothing, and come out going, “SEE, I TOLD YOU I AM NOT RIGHT FOR THIS” and some fucking manager will be thinking, “This is great!”

I don’t wanna be great.

I thought the 8AM meetings hurt – I logged in yesterday at 7:30 and found *another* last second meeting invite for a weekly 7:30 meeting. HAHAHAHAHAHA, FML.

Yesterday’s meeting was…a mess. I handed it off to the other SM cause I don’t know what I’m doing yet and we basically did 40 minutes of cut & paste from one section of our feature tracking page to another… No real concern over the fact that of 6 features we want in the next version, we only have design docs for 2 of them… Not sure it was a great use of anyone’s time, and frankly, my presence is superfluous at best. Anyone already on the team could cut & paste and ignore the lack of design docs.

At least on the real workload side, the week isn’t *as* bad as I thought it would be – I have a spreadsheet (because of course I have a spreadsheet) with all my defects, the deadlines, the estimated time to do them, and how much time I actually have to do them. Somehow, I had this coming weekend deducted out of “time available” in there twice – nice to suddenly find two days out of nowhere.

And speaking of workloads, it’s time to go do the thing. You have a great day and don’t get yourself invited to a weekly 7:30AM meeting.

A bleary eyed Happy Pride to all! Don’t invite your oppressors to the parade. It will be interesting to see if work says anything this week, or if they do their usual “Oh shit, it’s Pride Month” message the last week of June.

It’s gonna be another brutal week at work where I try and fit roughly 6 days of work into 3 1/2. Probably should have tried to get ahead over the holiday weekend, but fuck, I shouldn’t have to work over my holiday weekend.

I don’t know how our workload scheduling got so fucked up, but here we are, and I’m going to continue to send the QC lead a *weekly* breakdown of what hours I actually have available each month, because I don’t think they realize how much “not work” shit I deal with every week and maybe that will help a little. Probably should have done that ages ago – I just didn’t realize how many meetings, focus groups, training time, etc, I deal with every week.

And this damn new project role. This has got to be a punishment of some sort, I swear. I don’t think I’ve mentioned the actual role – Scrum Master for one of our modules for the next version. JFC – agile development is SO dude centered – the reason it’s called a Scrum Master is because if they called it what it is – Administrative Lead – no guy would do it. But make it sports and D&D, and they’re all in. And I remain utterly unconvinced that I am the right person for it. (I was told I would basically be the QC liaison. This is not even remotely that in any way, shape, or form.) And I’m still listed as SM for another module that will move to agile in the version after this next one – that had better get fixed.

It should have been our QC lead as the SM – but “he’s got too much on his plate” – well, get some shit off his plate so you actually have the right person in the role.

And people think I sought out this role, FML.

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.