July 22, 2015 at 1:04 pm
Brandie Tarvin (7/22/2015)
Gotta love it when someone schedules a software change/update at month end. Because "there's no impact to the business" and all that.<headdesk>
This too I will survive.
I hope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNDl41HfvxI
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
_______________________________________________
I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
SQL RNNR
Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
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July 22, 2015 at 3:06 pm
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
Gosh... there's so much wrong with all of this. Both sides have done little more than to drive larger wedges between the two groups in this conversation and none of it directly addresses the more important underlying problems. All parties had the opportunity to shine and didn't. But even that doesn't address the much larger problem that allowed this failure to occur in the first place and I'm no talking about the reported "fault", either. I could cite a dozen or more shortcomings that led to this but even they can't be fixed until people realize that the real fix requires a serious cultural change and it must be reflected by process.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
July 22, 2015 at 3:53 pm
Jeff Moden (7/22/2015)
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
Gosh... there's so much wrong with all of this. Both sides have done little more than to drive larger wedges between the two groups in this conversation and none of it directly addresses the more important underlying problems. All parties had the opportunity to shine and didn't. But even that doesn't address the much larger problem that allowed this failure to occur in the first place and I'm no talking about the reported "fault", either. I could cite a dozen or more shortcomings that led to this but even they can't be fixed until people realize that the real fix requires a serious cultural change and it must be reflected by process.
Looks like big Business Intelligence problem. (Play on word intended.) :w00t:
For best practices on asking questions, please read the following article: Forum Etiquette: How to post data/code on a forum to get the best help[/url]
July 22, 2015 at 6:43 pm
Jeff Moden (7/22/2015)
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
Gosh... there's so much wrong with all of this. Both sides have done little more than to drive larger wedges between the two groups in this conversation and none of it directly addresses the more important underlying problems. All parties had the opportunity to shine and didn't. But even that doesn't address the much larger problem that allowed this failure to occur in the first place and I'm no talking about the reported "fault", either. I could cite a dozen or more shortcomings that led to this but even they can't be fixed until people realize that the real fix requires a serious cultural change and it must be reflected by process.
I have to agree with Jeff here. You do yourself no justice by stubbornly sticking to an approved requirements specification as justification for a system not working as a BU needs it to work. Neither does the BU win itself any points by not recognizing that they may have erred when approving an incomplete requirements specification.
The boundaries of the scope of any software project will always be consistently under-defined at a project’s inception, and will expand to include the project’s minimum requirements by the time the project is accepted.[/url]
The ultimate test of whether a software product/project is successful is suitability to the BU's task at hand.
Last summer, I got to work on requirements through development of a system that did Customs clearing. While I was doing the requirements, I was nearly at my wits end when I realized that the process itself was rife with exceptional cases. And as everybody knows, software generally needs to be coded to the widest possible range of exception cases. The problem was that the number of exceptions involved would have made the requirements spec into a tome the likes of War and Peace. It just wouldn't be humanly possible in any reasonable timeframe.
So what I did was tell the BU that for this system, probably the best I could do was address 80% of their needs by UAT (those that I could wrap my head around during the relatively brief requirements analysis stage), while at the same time building in as much flexibility and configurability as possible.
In the end, there were some gaps of course, which fortunately my BU realized were things they had forgotten to tell me for the most part, so change requests boosted the system's usability to nearly 100% of the actually required cases.
The final capitulation of "I'll live with it" may have been more of frustration kicking in than actually admitting they were wrong in the second place.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St
July 23, 2015 at 2:44 am
I have to agree with Jeff here. You do yourself no justice by stubbornly sticking to an approved requirements specification as justification for a system not working as a BU needs it to work. Neither does the BU win itself any points by not recognizing that they may have erred when approving an incomplete requirements specification.
Part of the problem is that we are providing a managed service to another company that provides a service to the government. Both the other company and the government won't hesitate to pin the blame for any failings on us. Hence the stubbornly hiding behind specs when there's a mistake.
To be fair to the other side, I heavily paraphrased the conversation and perhaps I was venting a bit after getting frustrated with trying to explain why what happened, happened. There was quite a lot of backwards and forwards with non-technical people who weren't getting that because the report was written the way they had asked for it initially, it excluded the situation that occurred. A lot of what we do has grown organically over a long time. Every so often something arises that previously either couldn't happen for legislative reasons, couldn't happen for technical reasons or, because the general public and government are involved, is something that our BA's, op's teams and management, could never have dreamed of happening in a thousand years. In the past, the BU would get together with us and we'd establish what happened and where the breakdown had occurred. After that, both sides would go away and make the necessary changes. In fact this report was specked out after such a meeting, at that time though the application that allowed the incident wasn't in use so it never came up. Nowadays, the BU is another company with much less (no) experience of providing the service we used to. Given the high profile of what we do, they are very keen not to be associated with any mistakes, hence the immediate accusation that it was my fault and demand that I do something about it.
I accept that I could probably have handled things a bit better and nine times out of ten, it's a case of working with the staff in the BU rather than against them. It's just very annoying to be accused of something that may not have been down to me. My later post does mention the fact that the report is essentially called 'I don't do this' and they were using it with the hope that it did.
As I also mentioned, because of our good relationship in general with the BU, I'm working away on a report to do what they wanted the original report to do. It's actually a different, very much more complicated situation than the initial one although they are superficially similar. I think that's where the confusion arose at first, I can see why they thought the original report would work.
I take on board what you both said. Jeff, you are completely correct about cultural changes being needed. At ground level, everybody understands the need to work together to get the job done. As you progress up the ladder though things change. On our side, senior management are seriously and rightfully PO'd with how the government handled the contracts. This is part of the reasoning behind the 'do things to the letter' mentality. We got burnt expensively and publicly because of differing interpretations of documents and they're not keen for it to happen again. They're also not massively keen to hand over a lot of IP that is still in use on other contracts, to a competitor.
On the other side, they as a company are anecdotally quite arrogant. They tend to take over contracts with the attitude 'if you lot were any good, you'd still be doing this'. This leads to a lack of listening and understanding of other opinions.
All in all, the situation is a long way from ideal. We're all trying to make the best of it with differing ideas of best.
How to post a question to get the most help http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537
July 23, 2015 at 4:27 am
Alvin Ramard (7/22/2015)
Brandie Tarvin (7/22/2015)
Gotta love it when someone schedules a software change/update at month end. Because "there's no impact to the business" and all that.<headdesk>
This too I will survive.
I hope.
What's wrong with doing a software change at month end if there's no impact to the business? 😀
😎
Hey, Hippo. See that guy Alvin over there? He tried to steal your tent. Go get 'em.
@=)
July 23, 2015 at 5:46 am
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
And still reported by them up the chain as "IT *****d up" no doubt. Idiots like that will just *never* take responsibility for their actions.
I'm a DBA.
I'm not paid to solve problems. I'm paid to prevent them.
July 23, 2015 at 7:36 am
andrew gothard (7/23/2015)
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
And still reported by them up the chain as "IT *****d up" no doubt. Idiots like that will just *never* take responsibility for their actions.
Sadly, that seems to be a growing trend in business today. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. Those that do really stand out as stand-up individuals and tend to succeed. Granted, you have to take responsibility for the both good and the bad. The point is to have lots of good things and as few bad things as possible. There's probably a cause and effect relationship between those who are good taking responsibility, but I don't have any data to substantiate the assumption.
July 23, 2015 at 7:48 am
Ed Wagner (7/23/2015)
andrew gothard (7/23/2015)
BWFC (7/22/2015)
Aargh!!'Why didn't this appear on your report? It's wrong. There's been an incident and you've made us look bad in front of government.' - The Business
<investigates>
'It's not supposed to have appeared. It doesn't meet any of the conditions you specified.' - Me
'It should have appeared. The report is supposed to find these cases. You need to fix it.'
'The report does a) exactly what it says on the tin and b) exactly what you asked for it to do. The process failed at your end.'
'No, it's wrong, it should have found it. That's what I wanted it to do. It needs to be fixed urgently.'
'It isn't wrong, it does precisely what the spec says. My boss agrees and so does his boss.'
'It needs to be fixed ASAP. There is a fault that caused an incident and we had to explain to government.'
'It's not a fault. It does exactly what you asked us to do and it very specifically won't include this type of situation. To get what you want you'll need to complete a change request which will have to go through CAB. I'll start work on it immediately but I can't release it until you fill in the form.'
'We'll just live with it in that case'.
I'm keeping those emails to hide behind when the balloon goes up again.
And still reported by them up the chain as "IT *****d up" no doubt. Idiots like that will just *never* take responsibility for their actions.
Sadly, that seems to be a growing trend in business today. Nobody wants to take responsibility for anything. Those that do really stand out as stand-up individuals and tend to succeed. Granted, you have to take responsibility for the both good and the bad. The point is to have lots of good things and as few bad things as possible. There's probably a cause and effect relationship between those who are good taking responsibility, but I don't have any data to substantiate the assumption.
This very morning there has been an email from the BU accepting that they had misunderstood how the report works. There have been apologies from both sides and the CR for the new report has been put in. There has also been some movement on streamlining the change system. In future there'll be less need for a lengthy approval process to make changes to reports as things develop rather than fighting them through as a fix.
How to post a question to get the most help http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537
July 23, 2015 at 8:17 am
BWFC (7/23/2015)
This very morning there has been an email from the BU accepting that they had misunderstood how the report works. There have been apologies from both sides and the CR for the new report has been put in. There has also been some movement on streamlining the change system. In future there'll be less need for a lengthy approval process to make changes to reports as things develop rather than fighting them through as a fix.
And that is possibly the best of all outcomes, when a broken or over-burdensome process is recognized and adapted so that everyone can breathe easier.
July 23, 2015 at 8:22 am
Brandie Tarvin (7/23/2015)
BWFC (7/23/2015)
This very morning there has been an email from the BU accepting that they had misunderstood how the report works. There have been apologies from both sides and the CR for the new report has been put in. There has also been some movement on streamlining the change system. In future there'll be less need for a lengthy approval process to make changes to reports as things develop rather than fighting them through as a fix.And that is possibly the best of all outcomes, when a broken or over-burdensome process is recognized and adapted so that everyone can breathe easier.
Agreed. The bureaucracy is crumbling under its own weight, so it's being fixed. I hope the fix is real. Well done.
July 23, 2015 at 8:26 am
Wondering what you all would say if you were presented with a NoSQL system being developed for all your data and were told "It isn't meant to be ACID"
--------------------------------------
When you encounter a problem, if the solution isn't readily evident go back to the start and check your assumptions.
--------------------------------------
It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.
What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?
You ask a glass of water. -- Douglas Adams
July 23, 2015 at 8:35 am
Sioban Krzywicki (7/23/2015)
Wondering what you all would say if you were presented with a NoSQL system being developed for all your data and were told "It isn't meant to be ACID"
"Enjoy supporting that. Excuse me while I brush off my resume."
July 23, 2015 at 8:41 am
Ed Wagner (7/23/2015)
Brandie Tarvin (7/23/2015)
BWFC (7/23/2015)
This very morning there has been an email from the BU accepting that they had misunderstood how the report works. There have been apologies from both sides and the CR for the new report has been put in. There has also been some movement on streamlining the change system. In future there'll be less need for a lengthy approval process to make changes to reports as things develop rather than fighting them through as a fix.And that is possibly the best of all outcomes, when a broken or over-burdensome process is recognized and adapted so that everyone can breathe easier.
Agreed. The bureaucracy is crumbling under its own weight, so it's being fixed. I hope the fix is real. Well done.
The fix is real and working. As long as it's on the correct form we can start working. No need for approval by a committee on their side then a committee on ours just to add a line of text to a report. It should see us get busier too. I've already had something through to get started on.
How to post a question to get the most help http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537
July 23, 2015 at 8:45 am
BWFC (7/23/2015)
Ed Wagner (7/23/2015)
Brandie Tarvin (7/23/2015)
BWFC (7/23/2015)
This very morning there has been an email from the BU accepting that they had misunderstood how the report works. There have been apologies from both sides and the CR for the new report has been put in. There has also been some movement on streamlining the change system. In future there'll be less need for a lengthy approval process to make changes to reports as things develop rather than fighting them through as a fix.And that is possibly the best of all outcomes, when a broken or over-burdensome process is recognized and adapted so that everyone can breathe easier.
Agreed. The bureaucracy is crumbling under its own weight, so it's being fixed. I hope the fix is real. Well done.
The fix is real and working. As long as it's on the correct form we can start working. No need for approval by a committee on their side then a committee on ours just to add a line of text to a report. It should see us get busier too. I've already had something through to get started on.
Excellent. It's always great to hear encouraging news like that. Well done.
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