dybr

 Ok, the end of a quarter. Everybody's hiding.

Since Jeremey wanted me to move on with that Ops case, and I need to a) see the logs, and b) get access to the database, I have to do something. As to the logs, they are kept for just 15 days. I don't know, do we have SOX, or what? Do we have a user history in the db? Can the user roll back (in their dreams, probably).

So I needed at least to install that homegrown postgres tool. One of the installation stages requires to turn off VPN. How exactly? This is a corp computer, VPN was installed by those people in the office, and I have no control over it. I wrote to support channel. One sent me to another. Wrote to another. Esteban answered that I need to click the VPN button on top. Ok, many, I saw lots of "VPN buttons on top" in my life, but this is not the case. So I wrote, and now I'm waiting for the support to react. But this is the end of a quarter.

Then I decided to go ahead and investigate that case, where somebody upgrades a user to admin, but nothing happens. They did roll back my changes (unrelated), now we need to check whether the functionality is back. Where are the tests? 

Since there's more than two methods with the same name, `updateUser()`, I did this: I took every such method and inserted `throw new Exception("JUST CHECKING")` - and ran all the tests. 

Nothing.

How come?! There are tests for these cases, I know. Started investigating the tests.

Ha, that's Spanish contractor trick. They mock the system they were supposed to test. Here's the mock, it returns this, and we test it in our test suite, making sure that it returns what we want it to return. The only thing this test checks is that the method is actually called (it's a mock). Except that the method is called explicitly from the test.

See, I do have some experience in software development, but I never saw such tests in my life yet.

Ok, and at 4:30 we had a "standup"; there were five of us! Jeremey, Esteban, Bill, Brad, me.

After that I checked again whether the support told me how to turn off their mystical VPN - no answer. So, ok, goodbye Second Quarter.