Over the past few weeks I realized a problem in one of the projects I’m currently involved in. Our customer is located in Brasil and has contracted an external company for the integration into the legacy software system culture and accteptance testing of the delivered solution. They maintained the legacy system for the last years and have very good business knowledge about it. This company has contracted us in order to deliver that system. So far, sounds great, doesn’t it?

Not that much. What has happened over the last one and a half year is the following. Our company just gets vague informations regarding requirements from the customer. We give lots of information, but they often do not make sense. The company that contracted us knows more about the legacy systems, but does not provide this information to the competitor – to us. Therefore it was a torture to get the system right after long chains of late change requests over the past month which basically ended up in rewriting everything we had. Sounds worse, now, doesn’t it?

But I’m not quite finished. What now unfolds is the need for my company to deliver the system in order to make money with it in this very year. The end-customer has some money he wants to spent for a new system and we are in long term relationships with them. In order to finish this off together with data conversion in this year, we need to deliver the system until midth of September latest – we thought until last Friday. Now the middleman company made the proposal to postpone production date for two weeks and asked us to deliver any priority one blocker bugs in three calendar days – while dealing with the pending change requests, too, of course. All together they have sucessfully exercised over the past few months five percent of the tests they planned. The others are blocked or got some errors. Curious, isn’t it?

It gets better. We have so far around ten bugs from the opened in our bug tracking system, five currently fixed of these, three fixed by tomorrow and the remaining two should be dealt with over this week. Now, the question today arose, how come we just get this few number of bugs back if just five percent of the tests were sucessful with about 75 percent being blocked? (An unfair question to ask, but let me continue.) A colleague today arrived back from on-site visit and he explained that the middleman company seems to open twenty bugs, if we fix ten. When we fix those twenty, they’ll probably open fifty new ones and so on. Sure, this is an absence of trust due to remote location of implementation teams, etc., etc. The point that strikes me, is that the end customer who will be paying both our companies in the end, is listening to them. Therefore we are asked to do massive overtime on the weekends, in the late nights (5 hour time difference is a tough working.), etc.

Oh, of course, we already tried the obvious: Working together with the other company. So far it did not work. We’re continuing to try, but with semi-success so far. When put aside their testers a technical expert for our system just gets asked questions about how to export a shell variable or how to use that key combination in vi (should use emacs from my pov). The striking point is that the other company does not realize the mutual benefit situation we should have. Now comes the interesting part. Today I was reminded on the negative aspects about metrics like “how many bugs do you find?” Some weeks ago the founder of the Miagi-Do school, Matthew Heusser, pointed myself out to a paper from Cem Kaner on metrics: Software Engineering metrics: What do they measure?. Today I was very, very surprised that in case of that other company, you don’t seem to need those metrics to do harm to a project. All you need to do is basically give that middleman company the feeling that they won’t be needed any longer in mid-term.

This reminded myself of some terms of some of the manifestos around:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
• Not only customer collaboration, but also productive partnerships

… and certainly there are more of these. But what I noticed today is quite the opposite. Please share your comments with me.