Sunday, January 8, 2012

Corporate Lies and Timesheets

All testers have filled timesheets; most people fill out timesheets stating that we work 8 hrs in a day. That is today's biggest lie from the corporates. We all know that it is never ever possible to work exactly for 8 hours 0 mins and 0 seconds; obviously, it would be for sometime more than that or less than that. When questioned, the project manager would cleverly counter that claim stating that he did not work for 8 hours, but that he did 8 hours worth of work on that day; The argument claims that he might have taken sometime more or less, but then the work that he did was work that's worth 8 hours. That becomes the 2nd biggest lie.

If he had the ability to do 8 hrs of work in less than that time, then how could it be 8 hours worth of work? To answer this, the senior project manager would claim the development of components that reduce his working time and improve productivity. And then he would bring in the magic word "automation" to claim that they were able to automate that much amount of time to reduce productivity.

That's the 3rd biggest lie; most automation that's been developed would be screen capture components. The 3rd question is if it reduces the working hours, then why does it not improve billing time and gives the client reduced billing time? To answer that, the client would most probably say that they will reduce billing time, but the tool that's being used is created for intelectual usage and the company has to pay for that tool usage.

And the conversation goes on... The conversation, which started with a focus on quality, ends due to money. In the end, money wins and quality loses!!!

4 comments:

  1. Hello Fake Tester! (4th question why are you anonymous ;-)?)

    8 hours are filled for the billing. I do not see any relation of billing and quality of the software.
    Let the management do what possibly they can do that's what i feel.

    Quality is everyone's job. The responsibility should be shared to deliver the good quality product.

    You being a tester can do wonders to help to improve the quality of the product.

    5th question "How much it matters to you about 8 hours billing?" Does it really hamper your productivity or your quality of your deliverable :-)

    Cheers!
    Savi

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  2. Hi Savitha,

    1) I am not anonymous; I have actually revelaed my true self to the world. I am always under the impression that it's rest of the world that's anonymous and don't reveal their true self. Don't you agree? :)!!! On a side-note, it's just a chosen mask; not a secret identity.

    2) We don't do 8 hours of work every day; If we keep exact count, am sure we would be not averaging any close to 8 productive hours of work every day;the point is that this is the biggest corporate lie that's accepted by all corporates!!!

    3) Quality and Billing --- The connection is that in the end stages, when the client points out quality flaws, the management tends to point them as out-of-scope and tell them that it was not planned; or out of scope of billing hours.

    4) And to answer your last question, yes; it's not about what matters to me; it's about popular perception as to what actually matters to the rest of the world --- is it money or quality? I think money comes before quality for the rest of the world --- and I am very tempted to join that world!!!

    Am really not sure if that answered your queries!!!

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  3. Come on, open your eyes, see the real world. Given the state of IT in India, without doubt everyone clocks more than 9/10 hours. So in fact, we bill the client less than what we work.

    Forget about quality of software, quality of life is going down...

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    Replies
    1. disagree... there might be peaks now and then, but look at your average over a 6 month or 1 year period!!!

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