So, I work in a medium sized team and earlier in this year, our team helped another that was behind in some tasks that all of us need to complete together.
After this, that team always asks for help from our team for untested things from their side and the worst part is whenever something breaks on their side, it breaks for a lot of people (like us) too, and they break a lot of stuff, simply not testing anything, no unit tests, no integration tests, nothing, they just throw broken shit out of the door.
This happens even to the things we made at their place, something’s up with our code? They changed it. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s adding 2 lines to a sql query, they added an extra comma and didn’t test, they changed the batch processing? Now the process returns a broken json with different fields than the Enum expects. Yeah, they changed the value of the field that was ALREADY working for no reason and didn’t test it.
I’m pissed off, told my coworker that it’s their problem now, but the problems always come and the boss call us to help. This is very frustrating for us and for other teams too, even today another boss was talking about them breaking things in another system that we and they interact.
Their boss seemed to just want to give work for them, even with these problems coming back. The outsourced people work better than them, but you know, they are outsourced and the not so competent team is in house, so they can do nothing.
What can I do? Just saying no when the problems come? Talking to their boss?
Talking to the boss seems a bad idea, yeah.
I’m thinking about doing a teaching session with the whole team (for the whole project), to explain things in the grand scheme of things of how they work, this might help with what each part of the code does. The project is huge, but the teams are medium sized and we are hiring a lot of people, so it might be good for all to know a little bit more.
If they’re not competent this will be a waste of time. I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, just have low expectations.
That team needs technical leadership on their end who can enforce standards and quality.
That’s leadership. Sounds like a plan.