Week 8: just about time
After facing all kinds of situations, inconvenience, problems, and more we finally settle down, the work that the team has been doing for the last weeks materialized into something that we could fully interact with, now it feels like a functional machine, you understand how it works, and if something fails, now you know what it needs to be replaced so it can get back to work. It was a great feeling when you see how close you are to that last step.
The last days were so different from what I expected, but in a good way, we still have a lot of work ahead of us, but things were coming out very quickly, we were all synchronized, someones with a better pace than others, but everyone giving their best, contributing, helping each other, we are finally a proper team.
Final details
When you are reaching the end of a project your mindset changes, now you wonder if all of the work you have been doing will be worth it, or useful, at times you get a little bit worried about the current state of your system, it’s never at its 100%, it’s getting closer but not enough, you don’t really know how is it going to perform in a real production environment, you know it’s the response for a closed one, that’s the way you have been working for weeks, but in real life, everything is so different, you cannot control the users, the always managed to break the program, that’s a fact.
Houston we have a problem
Avoiding that is a very fun activity, you start playing with your system, trying to type, click, move or do everything that you can so your system collapse, suddenly you a QA engineer, sort of. After a while, you start to discover some error, sometimes they’re just some simple bugs, nothing to worry about, some of them are even fun, the ugly part comes when you click something and everything crashes, you can feel the drop of sweat falling from your head, and when you are so close to the deadline it’s even worse. So, you report the problem with your team, and everyone panics, you can hear some of them biting their nails, you can smell the smoke that’s coming out of their heads, the fear of not accomplish what you promised increases until one member solves the problem, and it was just a couple lines, I think that’s what makes it worst, the fact that maybe just one simple line of code, even one single character could break everything you have been working for.
The last dance
The moment you have been looking for finally came, you solved most of the bugs you found (at least the important ones), the demo that you prepared for the client is ready, the deployment is almost ready, but you only one more thing, the approval from the client. In our case it was a bit different, our client has never seen a completely functional version of the system, which added some pressure, they had an idea of how some parts work, we were excited to show them a final version, with all of the roles, functionalities, how is it gonna look in different devices, some features that they have never seen or even a couple ones that we implemented thanks to the feedback that they gave us, but we were also scared, what if they don’t like it at the end? or what if they expected something else? it freaked me out until the demo began.
In resume, everything went pretty good, they liked the system and they are excited to test it, it may not be a definitive version, but is a beginning, we put a lot of effort into it, and achieving that with very little time is something I feel proud of.