Peter’s First Mistake

Who is Peter?

Peter got his master in informatics last year. He was a good student, but not at all cost. Let's just put it this way: he enjoyed life at University too. This attitude was picked up by some fellow students and they became good friends. One of them was Marc. Marc's sister, Elisabeth, works for Continuum and that's how the two of them ended up at their first employer.

What has Peter been doing lately?

Since 3 months, Peter works at customer X, a large company in the center of Brussels. He and his team are involved in a major release of a project for calculating tax income. He is definitely the junior one in the team. At first, it was not simple to learn the new libraries - to mention just two, Hibernate and Struts, were completely new to him - and, at the same time, getting familiar with the business functionality. After all, who had thought tax-matters would ever interest him? But, they do.

Pair Programming got him through the first days. It is great. You learn by every keystroke and quality is much better than expected. And what's even more, from time to time his education paid off: he could improve parts of the code of his buddy, who had been working far longer than him!

Another nice experience was the Scrum approach. Although at customer X all projects need to use RUP in a rather strict way, Continuum somehow managed to approach the first project with a completely new methodology. What's challenging for Peter are the daily stand-ups where he must tell what he has been doing and what he will be doing and, at the same time, point out his blocking issues. And what's so fulfilling about this way of working is that at the end of every Sprint (iteration in Scrum) of thirty days, business is directly using software he has written!

And than, that dark day at customer X!

Today, Peter has been struggling with lazy loading in Hibernate. Alone. His buddy was sick. At the end of the day, he found a working solution, not great, but working. He needs to talk about it tomorrow with his buddy. Hopefully he'll be there.

In the evening, there is a put-your-questions meeting at Continuum. At least one hour drive, late at home. He attends it because he is preparing for his Java programmer's certificate. He's going to ask questions about threading in Java, but perhaps someone could explain him again about lazy loading options in Hibernate. It has been in his mind all day...

The meeting takes longer than planned, since a lot of questions need an answer in depth. And than it just strikes him without warning. One flash through his mind: he did not check-in the latest version of his solution! And it was the last day of the Sprint, so a code-build will go to pre-production. It will surely fail, and all this due to his mistake!

What should he do? By now, it's already ten o'clock. He realizes there is only one proper thing to do: turn on his laptop, use the VPN connection to connect to the customer and check in the latest version. He also calls his project manager to bring him up-to-date. At midnight, the new build is made.

The code did not fail next day. The customer could start using the program without any delay.

Today Peter learned the difference between involved and committed.