The Butterfly Diaries 12 - Maintenance Maladies

Any program, like a school child, needs to be corrected multiple times before it finally does what it is supposed to do. And there always remains some room for improvement, even in the simple ‘hello world’ program. Say, the font.

So, it did not surprise me when our project did not deliver software to the client’s full satisfaction even in February. But the boss lady was honest and persuasive, and she convinced the client that this was the best they could get, and the rest would evolve through the five years of a maintenance and enhancement contract. And surprisingly they signed up for it.

And before we knew it, we had moved from development into maintenance. And I was part of a bug fix team led by Mr. Dependable. The other members were Mr. Ambitious and two new freshers – Mr. Noisy and Mr. Quiet. Suddenly I found myself the seniormost developer on the team, lording it over the youngsters.

But my good friend Mr. Noisy begged to differ. “Having been on the project longer does not make you special. Give us six months, and we would all be as good, if not better.”

Mr. Ambitious on the other hand focused more on action than on words – trying to go above and beyond – volunteering to work on white papers and supporting project management tasks.

Mr. Quiet for his part seemed to have already attained a state of Nirvana. He simply ignored hierarchies and went about performing the task assigned to him with an air of indifference.

The problem with our lead Mr. Dependable was that he was too dependable. For anything and everything – for technical support, for emotional support, for organizational support.

He had answers to almost any technical doubt we came up with. He fixed more bugs than any of us. And he was the dream supervisor any employee could ask for. For instance, if he made us work on a holiday, he personally made sure we got a compensatory day off, even when the policy had no provision for one.

But the trouble with a too dependable boss is that he leaves you nothing to be depended on for.

And then there was me – the team’s biggest source of what I would learn to call 'process variance'. We used to get 18 defects a day on average. The three juniors could solve three each, I could do four and Mr. Dependable five on average. The problem was that my average of four meant that on a good day I would do six or even seven. But on my bad day, I might do only two or even just one. And given the defects that came in also varied between 16 and 20, if a 20-bug day happened to be my bad day, we were in serious trouble.

Mr. Dependable spoke to me about it. I understood but there was little I could do. For it all depended on my mood and I had no control over that. And it was not like I was still pining for that girl in Chennai or my old friends there either. Also, smoking had stopped helping. I decided it had all along been giving only an illusion of fixing the mood.  With the departure of Mr. Genius, the brilliant client-side programmer, to join the onsite team, I was left the last man standing from the old fellowship of the tobacco fumes. I had no appetite to carry forward the legacy all alone and so I quit smoking.

I tried other things - dark coffee, chocolate, Iron Maiden songs. I even tried wandering aimlessly in the area outside the campus. But none of it seemed to work.

I wondered if there was an underlying unease about the broader state of affairs. Did I want to be doing this same thing for the next five years? Maybe I did. Life was quite peaceful after all. I now had time to pursue passions such as marital arts and music classes, going on weekend treks and borrowing books from as many as three libraries.

But No. 4 had already left for Hyderabad. Mr. Zest had also told me that he was on the verge of cracking an interview for a place at a prestigious institute abroad. He too would be gone soon.

Maybe I too needed a change. I had not even stayed in the same house or school for more than three years ever. There was no harm in trying for a change in project, was there?

So, I decided to approach the boss lady requesting a release. And thus, I found myself seeking out the very thing I had been struggling for months to get out of – the dreaded bench.

She gave me a patient hearing. And then said, “If you need to do something different, there is so much you can do in our own project. There are so many different modules. If you think mainframe is legacy, we have Java as front-end technology. And beyond coding there are other things such as configuration management and process related activities. Why do you need to leave the project?”

And not stopping with words, she called Mr. Systematic, the current configuration controller, and told him to get me started on this.

“Isn’t Mr. Ambitious already working with you on this?” I asked him.

“Don’t you know?” he said in a low voice. “He has put in his papers.”