My last job, we had a customer who would open tickets with titles like “ is totally broken!” When what w was broken was one liter piece of css.
He was not popular with developers.
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I don’t get the computer stuff, but there’s the “can you open this?” instead…
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It is not, and our build machine has also been absolutely knackered since Monday, nightly builds failing all over the place.
First result on StackOverflow suggests “an aggressive anti-virus program” might be to blame.
Every incident I’ve raised on our IT system has been swiftly closed down because Visual Studio and Azure DevOps are not programs they’re paid to troubleshoot.
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Your management needs to go talk to their management. “You are keeping my people from doing their jobs.” is a pretty powerful motivator in functioning organizations.
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And if the answer is “so we’ll have better year-end results than you” then you know it’s time to go elsewhere.
Functioning was a key part of that, yes.
When did you all learn how to write unit tests?
I have a newbie on my team who’s straight out of University (though he did previously do an internship elsewhere).
Have slowly been feeding him stories to get him used to the product we work on and the way in which we work.
Last sprint we did some pair programming to write a new unit test (and do all the stuff that comes with adding a new test).
This sprint I thought I’d let him loose to write four more and this is what I ended up with four times in the pull request:
TEST(Test_Class, Test_Name)
{
bool NameOfMethodUnderTest();
}
Maybe that’s on me. I don’t know if I’ve ever explained to him directly what the purpose of a unit test is. There are however 600+ tests he could have looked at for a clue.
It’s been a while since I finished Uni, but it I’m pretty sure that’s something I knew, or picked up very quickly.
Well, I’ve seen contractor code where they’d obviously read the tests and written the minimal code to pass them. As in it was just a lookup table for each test case.
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Most of our devs learn how to write unit tests from more senior devs, but then we often recruit junior devs who have a PhD in a field unrelated to computing 
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I started a cs degree in the mid 90s, got sick of school, and did real world stuff, and finished the degree somewhere else a decade later. Formalized testing was not really a thing in my first of school. There were not any test frameworks, mocking wasn’t automated: if you wanted a mock network call, you had to stub out a library that did the stuff it need to do, and it was generally a pain. The situation in the real world wasn’t much better. I worked on some projects that had been running a long time, so they a suite of test code to test against, but new projects didn’t get leverage that.
I didn’t start seeing formalized unit testing until I went back to school, and it was a thing. one of my profs required tests for everything, using some c== framework. (he graded the code you wrote for the problem, and the code for tests. he had scripts that would run your code against his tests and your tests against his code, and he’d use that as the rubric to grae from.)
My understanding from talking to more recent grads is that testing is pretty well covered in most US curricula, but that the actual practiacl part of it isn’t. and the point of different kinds of tests (units, integration, end to end, RC testing) isn’t well covered. but I’d expect any new grad to be able to write unit tests using some framework for writing them, in whatever environment they got taught in.
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The aim of the task is to fill some gaps in code coverage. So I’m hoping the penny drops when he looks at the figures.
In other news, another team has developed issues that while not identical to our build machine woes are suspiciously similar. So I’m feeling a bit better about that stuff. Even if the issue doesn’t seem anywhere near being fixed and the end of sprint is approaching fast.
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I did some work for a shop that something like that had happened to. They were willing to give me a spec, and a way to run the tests in their CI, but wouldn’t let me see the tests, just the output of failing tests. They’d named the tests “test-1, test-2, …” That was annoying, because there were a couple places where the guy who’d written the spec and tests had been ambigous, and what I did failed tests, but, I thought, met the spec.
It was a great spec, though, made writing the code much easier. I did it as flat rate job, and I’d done the bid expecting it to take 80 or 100 hours, and it ended up taking maybe 30.
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I also have no idea if this is bad.
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Sounds pretty normal to me.
I mean, other than engineers having an very specific estimated time for corrective action.
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I wouldn’t mind if our phones and information weren’t also internet based.
In an area with no phone signal.
I’ve done a lot of work this week standing in random fields.
Edit . In driving snow.
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They had a minimum time for corrective action. Not the same thing : )
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If it helps I got that email at quarter to 5.
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I fixed all our builds!
Or rather, I found the config value I needed to turn off the bit of the build that was causing them to fall over.
I’ve not let IT know about this workaround as I want to know what it is they did specifically to cause this issue.
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I used to use an application which buried in the config options was one labeled “do not check this box”. Checking the box broke the application, you had to get support to unset the value in the database. There was no answer when I asked why it was there. (You did need superuser privileges to do it, at least).
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