doodle dabbles

Something extraordinary happened this past Friday, and it was something I had never experienced before. It was a team that pulled together in a time of need, and selflessly helped each other.

Some might read this and think “Ok, that happens to me all the time.” If it does happen to you often, consider yourself lucky.

The History

I have been writing a particular piece of software for about 6 months, and we are finally planning to expose this software to a subset of its prospective users for Acceptance and User-Interface testing.

For the 6 months that I’ve developed it, I have been the only tester, and the only person demonstrating it. I knew all along that at some point, I would have to unleash it on others and get a new set of eyeballs to really expose bugs, but it wasn’t at a stage where I was comfortable enough to do so.

But this past week, I proudly proclaimed in a meeting “yes, we can start user testing!” It resulted in quite a reaction from the room, almost one of disbelief. So we decided to have the user testing a week from that meeting, and have an internal dry run with our staff on Friday.

The Dry Run

Ah, the dry run. How to describe it? It was successful. They destroyed my program in minutes. Why is this success? Because that’s the point. The point is to find flaws before you show it off to the world. But we still have the main testing scheduled for next week. So I decided to work parts of the weekend to fix as much of the code as possible to have it running in a more stable manner.

The Team

What was extraordinary about this was the amount of help the team offered. If it was the type of team I am more used to working in, they would’ve casually offered help and then not done anything, especially since I was (until recently) the solo writer of the software. But this team spent most of their day helping work out kinks in my software and the overall environment in which it executes, plus they even offered to be on standby for the Labor Day weekend just to test software.

I can’t be too specific but I even got offers from colleagues to do some of the work that I would normally be tasked to do. And I gladly took them up on some of the offers. I understand that they are all doing it in the capacity of a job, but it was just something I had never experienced before, which makes me truly value the team.

I’ve been working in IT for about 8 years now. For most of those 8 years, I’ve worked by myself as a consultant, and handled all aspects of a project. Part of this was because I had worked with bad teams and had built up a distrust of working in teams in general. This was until I started working in a team full of totally competent individuals, who seemingly have zero issues of politics, who all get along, and who all seem to share an ethic of pulling together for a common cause — truly “taking one for the team.”

This experience, though small, definitely made an impression on me, and changed my views on generally working in teams. Yes, it was that easy. I know now what the true value of the cliché of a “team player” is.