The Corporate Runs

The War Council

Freddie was surprised by Samantha's shabby appearance when her shoulder suddenly slammed into the doorjamb of his office. "You look like Hell, Sam. What's wrong?" Freddie asked.

She did look like Hell as she rolled her reddened, sunken eyes and grabbed the doorpost for support. "It's your turn. They want you next."

As Freddie grasped what she was saying, his concern for her quickly gave way to more base survival instincts.

"Did they say what it was about? I mean, did they say anything about why?"

Freddie stammered on, but Samantha had a you-must-be-joking look that he thought might be registered as a lethal weapon.

"They're waiting," she said. She then propped herself up on her own shaky accord and shuffled toward her office. As Freddie stood and brushed the multi-colored donut sprinkles off of his lap, he was startled by the boom of Samantha's door slamming shut.

Freddie found the conference room filled to capacity -- save one chair at the far end of the long table. Looking up from his quiet conversation at the other end of the table, Caroline motioned toward the empty chair saying "Have a seat, my friend."

Freddie bowed his head and nodded, murmuring a genuinely respectful "Thank you."

"Fantastic, let's begin. Hi, how are you? I'm Caroline, and I'm assuming you're Freddie. This is your first time at a meeting of the war council, isn't it? In case you don't know everybody, let me do a quick round of introductions: Everyone this is Freddie, Freddie this is everyone."

"Yes, m'am," Freddie mumbled, trying to avoid the glares from around the room.

"What's the matter, kid? You sound nervous," Caroline said, smiling jovially. No one else in the room was smiling. "There's nothing to be nervous about, we're just going to ask a couple of questions. We're here to get a little information so we can make informed decisions."

Freddie nodded, still staring at the patch of table in front of him.

"We just have a few questions about a bug. It's number ... what number is that Norwood?" Caroline motioned toward the aide at her side, who towered over a laptop as though he could swallow it whole.

As the soft, blue LCD light of his laptop washed over his huge face, Norwood coldly intoned, "Bug number thirty-seven-sixteen: Priority: Fix Yesterday. Description: Receive 'Unknown Object Error' when user clicks on 'Resubmit' button. Assigned to Freddie, on three, two, two-thousand. Status: Unresolved."

"Right, right," said Caroline almost dismissively. "The user receives, he receives a ..."

"... an Unknown Object Error ..." Norwood reiterated.

"Right, an error when the user clicks ..."

"... the 'Resubmit' button."

"Right, whatever. Assigned to Freddie. That's you right?"

"Yes, it is," Freddie answered, looking up for the first time.

He now had a clue why he had been summoned. In fact, Jerry, his immediate supervisor had been trying to warn him for days that this particular bug might come back to bite him. This bug had a "high profile," as his supervisor put it, and was not one to "mess around with." Though he was loath to admit it, the message was lost on Freddie, who was distracted by the implication that he was otherwise "messing around" with the code.

Freddie had thought long and hard about the issues -- especially those involved in the big-picture evolution of the feature. The real power, Freddie decided early, was in the ability to modify the core functionality well into the future releases. This feature and its far-reaching architecture would be his bequest, his gift to the software universe. Seen in this light, the nimble, clever subtlety of the rich architectural texture in the underpinnings of the seemingly simplistic Resubmit feature was far too critical to sacrifice for the downright inane, if annoying, error messages that occasionally popped up during the test runs -- especially since the fix was at hand.

"Well?" Caroline said, keeping her smile. "Unresolved?"

"Taken care of," Freddie blurted out.

"Fantastic!" Caroline exclaimed as she slammed an open palm on the table. "You see that?" she shouted gleefully at her lieutenants around the room. "I knew the kid would have it worked out! 'Taken care of' he says. Excellent! Fantastic! So the fix is in the next drop and we can mark the bug as fixed!"

Freddie shook his head ever so slightly and said, "As good as in."

"Wait a minute," Caroline said, losing all humor. "What do you mean 'as good as in'? Don't you mean 'in'?"

The sudden change in tenor surprised Freddie, and he struggled a bit for the next words: "Well, I mean, it might not be in the very next drop."

"Oh, you've got the fix checked in but the changes might not make it to the next drop. That's okay. I understand. Sometimes a check-in will take a few days to make its way through the system. Why didn't you say so?"

"That's not exactly it."

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?"

"I mean the fix is not checked in."

"Now you've got me pretty confused, Freddie -- very confused." Caroline turned to her aide. "Are you confused, Norwood?"

"Very confused, Caroline" said Norwood.

"That makes sense, because I'm very confused, too. On the one hand, you say the bug is 'taken care of'; on the other hand, you say the fix is not checked in? How could that be? Help me out here."

"I'm just trying to say that I think I have the fix."

"Oh, so you got it working on your machine. Have the testers seen it working yet?"

"It's not in a state where I can share it with the testers yet."

"Then why don't you help me understand this a little better."

"I'll try," Freddie said will all humility.

"Fantastic," Caroline said firmly. "You try to help me now, because I want to know exactly what 'state' the fix is in as of this minute."

"It's like this: I think I may know how to fix this bug. I just need to try it out, and it should be fine," Freddie explained, mustering every possible ounce of positive assurance.

"Let me see if I've got this straight," Caroline said slowly as those around her winced. "When you say this bug is 'taken care of,' you mean that, while you haven't actually written any lines of code to fix the bug, you think you may know what you need to do to fix it when you get around to it."

"Exactly," Freddie, eager to explain his position. "You see, all I have to do is call Sam's new ResolveObject function, and then the object won't be unknown anymore when the user clicks --"

"-- That'll never work," Norwood interrupted. "We just made Samantha cut that feature. Her function never worked right, anyway -- too many bugs."

Freddie was shocked.

Caroline then turned to Norwood again. "What was the priority of this particular bug?"

Norwood leaned into his laptop again, pretending to have forgotten the actual priority of the bug. "Priority is 'Fix Yesterday'."

"Yesterday," Caroline repeated. "Well, we missed that deadline didn't we? And seeing as how the fix you had in mind won't work anyway, I think this feature is cut. Everyone agreed?" He looked around the table at the silently nodding crew.

"Fantastic. Norwood, was Freddie working on anything else other than this Resubmit user-interface feature?"

"No," Norwood confirmed.

"Fantastic. That should give Freddie plenty of time to think of new fixes he may have for lots and lots of bugs. We've got plenty to go around. Norwood, mark this bug 'Resolved,' let the test team know there won't be any regression testing needed, and enter a new work item for Mr. Freddie that he can maybe think about. Call it 'Remove All Remains of the Resubmit Feature,' and mark it with a 'Do it Now' priority."

Norwood quickly finished typing and hit the plastic Enter key with a flourish, and then fixed Freddie in his gaze. "Thank you. On your way out could you please send in SusanSt?"

Freddie's eyes were wide with unmasked distress. He dropped his jaw to say something, but nothing came out. Seeing no other choice, he rose and started toward the door to leave the conference room.

Right before Freddie slid out, another work-around came to him like a flash. His mind quickly swept through the inbound dependencies, and he proved to himself that it would work. Excited, he spun back through the doorway to tell the others of his revelation.

The room had been buzzing during his departure -- but as he came out with the summary of the fix, the council fell silent again, with all eyes on Freddie. The deafening quiet continued well after he had finished his desperately bright-eyed walk-through.

Finally, Norwood broke the silence: "Yes, but can you have it by yesterday?"

Freddie hung his head and the room slowly resumed its low humming chatter. As he closed the door behind him, he realized that he had no idea where to find SusanSt's office. Fantastic he thought to himself.