ClearDDTS? I have to ask…

Was there ever in the history of the world a worse bug tracking system than ClearDDTS? The user interface is so ugly, inconsistent and unfriendly that the only way they could have made it worse is if they’d used Lotus Notes as the front end. Slow? It takes a good 30 seconds to enter a new bug or process a change in an existing bug, something that should take way, way less than a second in any competent relational database.

And to top it off, recently it’s taken to kicking everybody off for 5-10 minutes at a time and not letting you log back in, while the sysadmin says “there isn’t anything unusual in the log files”.

The only reason for not throwing the whole thing away and switching to Bugzilla or something like that is that it integrates so well with ClearCase. And it has become apparent to me over the last few weeks that the only reason I loved ClearCase is that we had a really good full time ClearCase administrator, Steve. Since the powers that be fired him, we’ve got two guys struggling for a week at a time to do stuff that Steve could have done in a few minutes. And I no longer love ClearCase.

Let’s throw away the whole thing and replace it with that CMS that integrates with Subversion, ok? What’s it called, Trak or something like that?

Update: Just got an email from the sysadmin – evidently a process keeps dying. One called “update_htpasswd.sh”, which evidently updates the .htaccess file based on what is returned by “ypcat passwd”. Ok, I’m not an expert, but aren’t there ways to authenticate directly to NIS rather than building a .htpasswd file at regular intervals? Sheesh, talk about amateur hour!

Update 2: Minutes after posting that, the ClearCase vob crashed as well, and so I left for home.

How to ruin team communications in three easy steps

Step 1: Create a mailing list for developers, but allow non-developers including higher management to join it.

Step 2: Tell developers off for using that mailing list to discuss things that development needs to discuss but that management shouldn’t know about until it’s resolved.

Step 3: Use ad-hoc collections of mail addresses for real development communications, and then yell at developers for missing meetings that they never got invited to because you left them off your ad-hoc collection of mail addresses.

Is anybody surprised that I’m both the developer who got told off for using the dev-list to talk about development issues and the developer who accidentally got left off the invite list for the Thursday weekly meetings and got told off for missing them? Is anybody surprised that the issue I got told off for using the dev-list for was a complaint that when I mentioned a particular issue in meetings people ignored me and went onto the next item, and the person telling me off said that he’d never heard me mention this issue, thus proving my point?

Fascinating Facts

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

  1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
  2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
  3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
  4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.