On week 2 of April, Mr B, the user from Irritating Mad House sent an angry email about his Cow-selling Notes reports not generating. I didn't understand what he was talking about. Haven't even develop what, of course not generating lah. After clarification with the TL, I realized that there was an existing cow-selling report based on the old database table. Only Irritating Mad House has this report. After the new cow-selling notes went live, the data was no longer flowing to the old table. Hence no report was generated.
OOPS. This was undeniably our fault. Looked like existing reports were left out from the impact analysis of the specifications. At least for me, I didn't even know this report existed! And of all institutions, the screw-up had to happen to Irritating Mad House. Cham!
Actually, Irritating Mad House didn't want this CR at all. But all the others wanted it, and it was more difficult to exclude an institution than to apply for all, so Irritating Mad House had to accept it. For free. Not such a bad deal eh?
Since they didn't want it, no impact analysis was done for them. But it was also not highlighted that their report would cease to exist.
I don't know what to say.
Of course Mr B was not going to take ”no more old report anymore” for an answer. He threw a fit and demanded his report as he needed to give it to his boss. No, the new report was unacceptable.
What's wrong with the new report! More details what! What was the thing that couldn't be derived from the new report? This Mr B really got problem! And probably his boss too. Is there anybody at least marginally normal there?
No choice, TL and I had to write a query immediately to extract the data for him. Must fit into the format of the old report. In the end, it looked really crappy. I was sure Mr B was going to scream again.
Surprisingly, Mr B was placated. Got something to 交货 can already? That's so unlike him.
Something was up his sleeve. We knew it! He demanded we ”restore” his original report - with this new format he was proposing. For free. And he even provided the folder name to deposit the files in.
In short, Irritating Mad House first made things difficult by saying don't want don't want. The result - a free CR landed in their laps. Wait for us to make a mistake and 顺便 upgrade report. So 奸!
Well, we broke their report, didn't we? Lose liao lor.
Since I'm blogging about this, you must have guessed that I kena arrowed to do the report lor. Mr B provided the format he was expecting. Waa want to extract type X,Y but not Z, into 2 separate Excel files with different headers.... REALLY TAKING FULL ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION.
Haiz.
Mr B's requirements were not perfect of course. They will result in permutation of data and I'm not sure if he would like that. I requested the AiHiss contact, T, to confirm with B, but T also scared haha. In the end, for things that were not too major, we made our own assumptions and hoped for the safety of our heads.
On a brighter note, Mr B's requirements didn't include columns with 1000 characters. I am not interested in finding out whether DTS packages have the same weird problems as SSIS. The good (and bad) thing about DTS is that there is no control over the formatting of each Excel cell (not that I know of), so I could get away with not fixing cosmetic issues. ”It's like that! Technical limitation!”
The UAT went smoothly. Phew~ Rolled out 2 months later.
Apart from production issues, we were done with cow-selling notes. It could be the longest CR I have ever done. Don't want to hear from it again!
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