A day at TSI

Disclaimer: All characters in this post are real. Any resemblance to any person living is purely intentional. This is not a work of fiction.

8:30 AM. I enter into the office after a sleepless night. No, I wasn't talking or thinking about my girl friend that I had to be awake. It was due to the long uninterrupted power cut at our guest house. How I spent the night!

I turn on my comp, take a look at all nonsense emails & shift delete them. I wonder why MS-Outlook provides distribution list facility and why am I in any of those! I turn on all applications, start the server, which takes atleast 10 mins to start inspite of the 2GB RAM, and go for breakfast. I had missed it in my guest house, as I woke only at 7:15 AM.

9:15 AM. After a light filling veg sandwich, I return to my desk and check mails. Another round of shift deletes. Akshaya comes to my desk chewing his brand new Reynolds' pen cap. "Dost, I've assigned 2 trackers to you. Please check. One is mostly mainframe I think, but java investigation is needed. The other one, just look at it" he says. I'm all interested in the pen cap. "What are you doing with the pen cap?" I ask. "Dost, mujhe chabana ke liye kuch chahiye roz, aur mein apna chewing gum ghar mein hi bhool aaya. Isilye pen cap se kaam chala raha hoon". People and their habbits. "OK, I'll pick this up" I tell him, and he leaves my desk. The poor pen cap, it had (almost) lost its shape.

10:30 AM. I complete analysis of the first tracker and update it in the tracker database. It was indeed a mainframe issue, related to data. I'm about to pick up the second one, but then Gaurav comes and calls me for some help. "I'm not getting this problem - in debit account, the account number comes properly, but in credit account, it hash a dash '-' in between it. Can you please come and check?" he asks me. Ok, I say and go to this desk. I start analysing and could figure out that again this was a data problem. I ask him to update the tracker mentioning that mainframe analysis is required. "Yaar, ye mein kal update kar deta hoon. Aaj kiya to mujhe aur trackers assign karenge aur der tak baitne ko bolenge. Thanks for your help." he says. Hmm.. your wish, I thought. Boy, UAT and ST was going out in full swing.

11:30 AM. Akshaya again comes to my desk, this time much tensed than before. "Dost, see this requirement in Requirement Spec doc. Have we coded it?". I open the doc and then said "shit". "Why was this missed out?" he asks. I see the date of the document published and managed to cook up a story, "See, this document was published on 5th May, but we had already done our coding by 1st May. So these changes were missed out. Why didn't they tell us that the document had been updated? Now to do this, it will take 10 days" I say. Actually, a week was enuf to do these changes, but I put 50% buffer. Who doesn't want to work on stupid things? ;) "Ok, we will have a call with Rodger at 3 PM today and discuss it" he said. Fine enough. I resume my investigation of the second tracker.

12:00 PM. Sunita of System Testing team raises a tracker mentioning that there was some problem with accessing accounts which are more than 200 in number and marks its priority as High. Ajish and Lokesh of ST team too raise high trackers. Our dev team gate keeper (Akshaya again) is shocked and just reassigns the tracker to who ever was there in the list. I was the victim for one high tracker. The tracker count goes up to 28. Akshaya comes to my desk and says "Bade logo ne kaha hai ki tracker count ek page se upar nahi jana chahiye. Kuch bhi karo aur close kardo sab trackers ko". I wondered what was he trying to say, then I realise that in the tracker application, number of items per page was 25. "Tum tension mat lo, nipatlenge" I told him. I started working on this immediately. My second tracker..

12:45 PM. Deepti comes to my desk and calls for lunch. Geeta, Kunal, Ujjwal and Srikant join us. We joined 2 tables in the very small cafeteria. The most common topic during lunch was allowances. "I dont know why are they not paying us. First they told we would get at June starting. After that, they keep on telling to check tomorrow. I dont know which tomorrow are they referring. When I contacted Bhupinder of accounts team at Chandigargh, he's always busy and whenever he picks up, just tells tomorrow. He's now asked to send scanned copy of allowance form. Hud kar di" Kunal says. All voice their responses from Bhupinder. How much ever rounds we talk, the centre point was that our parent company wasn't interested in paying us. Flack! "Rakhi Sawant ka Swayamvar" - breaking news in some stupid news channel. They call this "Taaza Khabar". Also, they give the updates of serials too as a news item. So, the ladies can now afford to miss their favourite shows at home and catch them on news at office. We enjoy having lunch at our cafeteria.

1:30 PM. After the heavy lunch, I take a stroll around DLF, even though its 42 degrees outside. Cant work much after lunch na.. Some refreshment to the eyes ;)

1:50 PM. I'm back at my desk and start the high priority tracker. Continuosly slog for 45 mins. I got a solution.

2:35 PM. I go to Akshaya's desk and tell him that this tracker cannot be fixed due to constraints on database. I also showed him some old document which mentions this. He's full happy and asks me to show it to the testing team. But, there was a catch here, the document told that for addition, 50 was the limit to accounts, but for deletion, 200 was the limit. So, the tracker raised by Sunita was valid. "Thoda ullu banadenge ST team ko. Hum usse bolenge ki 50 hi maximum hai is document mein likha hai. We wont show them the 200 thing mentioned below. Aur is tracker ko close karne ke liye boldenge" he said. Amazing way to deal with trackers. We went to Sunita, confused her and finally she agreed to close the tracker accepting it as production behaviour. Convince or confuse.

3:00 PM. Call with Rodger. We just managed to confuse him further that the new requirement was not valid. Escape.

3:15 PM. I resume with my long pending second tracker. Vikas of ST team, who sits opposite me is very happy for some reason. He has found a bug! He comes to Ajish and asks, "Hey, step 3 of this script has failed. So should I pass or fail the test script? Should I execute the rest of the scripts as well?". Ajish gives him a stare and says, "Jo tum theek samjho, wo karo. Mujhe kyu poochte ho?". Vikas is a Test Analyst! "Ok, I'll fail this script. I'll take screenshots. Can you raise a tracker for this?" Vikas asks Ajish. Now, I stare at both, wondering whats happening. "Arrey, tum isko nikale ho. Tum hi raise karo tracker ko" Ajish blurts out. People.

3:45 PM. I complete analysis of the tracker and fixed it. I checked in the file in the ClearCase tool. I call Tribhuvan to check when the next build will be. "Yaar, code stable hi nahi hai. Dekhte hai. Jab code stable ho jaayega tab build kardenge. Itni saari cheeze hai, bahut mushkil hai. Hopefully next Wednesday tak ho jayega. Tumhara woh 200 waala ka kya hua? Tum to abhi 200 expert ho gaye ho. Hame bhi sikhado zara" he says. I laugh and replied, "Abbe, tumhe agar is application ko poori tarah se samajhna hai to pick up this tracker". "Nahi bhai, ye mere bus ki nahi hai.. Tum hi kar do" he tells. It was already done :). So some time pass for me for the rest of the day.

4:00 PM. Rupesh comes to my desk and asks for the status of trackers assigned to me. Infact, he goes to everyone's desk, so he has been nick named 'Tracker-Tracker' :D

4:15 PM. Anamika, who I think is the only responsible member in our team comes and asks me a valid doubt. I went to her desk and give her some directions for resolution. She catches my point and gives me an update on how to go about it. Sensible.

4:30 PM. I just thought of having a look at other trackers. Picked up a tracker randomly, in which Vishal Gupta had updated in it - "Intial investigation: looks like existing live issue." I laughed to the core as I knew this was a new bug introduced by dev team. Without any analysis, how can he just update this! Awesome people here. All are in air. Next I picked up another tracker on which Deepti had updated something - "1. No changes have been done on the pagination defaults as part of this release 2. This issue can't be recreated now for both the scenarios 3. It is not mandatory that the default will always be set to 10 for all pages. It depends on the case in question and also the navigation. So take it as existing production behaviour and please close this." ROTFL ! I just couldn't control my laugh. Even she seemed to be frustrated, as everyone else.

5:00 PM. As I had nothing else to do, I went to the only hotdesk in which one can chat. So chatted with some parent company friends after a long time. Akshaya again came running to me, "High tracker raised!". "Kal dekh lenge.. Aaj mera kaam ho gaya" I tell him. He agrees and says "pata hai.. maine aaj 6 trackers ko niptaya. Do tumhe de di, do Geeta ko, ek Bhavnish ko, aur ek maine kar daala." I recalled the tracker assigned to him, it was a easy fix for that. People work too much. He also told that he would join us while going as he had missed his cab.

5:40 PM. I went upto Deepti's and Geeta's desks, made them stop working and ran down to catch the cab. The cab wallah had already threatened that if we dont come by 5:40, he would leave us. We managed to board the cab, and again appologize for being late, as usual. "Ye kya faaltoo phatichar application bana rakha hai tum logo ne" Akshaya tells. "Ye tumhare liye hi bana hai. Tum log profit banaoge to hi hum logo ko tankha milega na" I replied. All thru the journey, we just crib.

.. and the saga continues..