4, 2 ka 1

"Ae jee oh jee lo jee suno jee ".... yes that is a Bollywood Ditty .. and I am no fan of the Actor and his family as there are hushed whispers of their strong underworld connection!! But, my weekend this week is pretty much that!!!

So in my current assignment - am working to Manage a System Integration Testing of Siebel CRM in a highly complex multi- vendor Telecom Domain project. The assignment is based on the merger of two leading Indian Telecom Players subcriber base across all Indian Circles! Well .. so what's the big deal you may ask?

TIMELINES and DESIGN CHALLENGE

As a Telecom professional we all speak the same jingo / jargon and language so it is a relief to be sitting in the environment. As is true of all Service Industry and typical in Telecom there is ALWAYS a burning fire in IT Applications. Development Teams, Test Teams, Admins and of course Project Managers have neither week ends nor holidays to themselves as we are busy doing delivery!!

SIT WAR Rooms are our habitat and we build a camaraderie across Vendors or "Partners" as we are referred to in polite parlance. So teams from the best in breed players - IBM, TCS, AMDOCS and Tech Mahindra sit all together and work in close collaboration. We have touchpoints across an end to end process, we all run in the same race there is collective victory. We answer Client Shadow Managers for the success of the assignment. There is no SINGLE LEAD / PLAYER - either we all sink together OR we all float together.

The teams are the best from Middleware, CRM, Billing, Program Management and other integrated software application providers. While each resource knows his/ her topic, they must shake hands with the other Partners or the design fails and Daily Committed tasks would spill over.

SAAM, DAAM, DAND, BHAID

We start our Mornings with a collective Scrum - all Partners update about the previous days tasks, moreso the lapses. Incase we have a dependency on another we highlight it, so the Shadow Board can take a quick call and resolve it. Thereafter we scatter to liaise with our Back End Support teams. In minutes we reconvene in SIT WAR Room and start our testing, with Back End teams on Video Conference, and HP QC beaming live online Score Cards, .. sab kuch dikhtaa hai! Client sits as Referee to intervene incase decisions for hand off take time or run into dispute.

Soonafter I joined the team, I figured I seem to have a disconnect. The team had a daily flogging for Aging Defects and they had no answer! With adrenaline running high, often the younger members go brain dead and are too frightened to speak up. The daily routine is "Check Defect-Analyse - Allocate - Follow Up". Investigating further I cracked the case we had 2 Test Environment. SIT2, which had received baselined code a month back - where we did high Speed Test Case Completion and SIT4 which was the Server where all Major production Fixes and Changes were deployed. So what about it? Well, the Aging Cases were TCs that tested the code that was built and deployed into SIT4 after the baselining!?!?!?

In a WAR Room one runs so fast with blinkers that no one stops to look around. As I am answerable for all Aging Defects - it occurred to me that unless the two environments sync up - there is no way out! We worked twelve hours a day, six days a week .. and unless we sorted out our differences there was no way we could close the increasing tally of defects. Discussions later while we all agreed that it was THE ONLY OPTION, no one was wiling to get on with the task. While Agreements / SoW / Emails and other documented proof protects us, if you are a Techie .. every morning .. when you wake up, while brushing your teeth, in the mroning rush to work .. in your over worked / spaced out / stressed to death lifestyles .. all you dream off is to go and do some WONDERFUL WORK today! EVERYONE of us, plans that TODAY we shall finish our tasks in two hours, then bum off and go see a movie or shop or just go sit in a pub with beer .. However 12 hours later, sitting in the SIT WAR room, eavesdropping on calls where families are calling and shrieking on the top of their voices that you need to get home .. that dream dies just peters off for a day!! Tech Mahindra was clear that we need to perform a Code Merger. All Partners backed up that it is required .. 'cause .. sink, and we sink together!! As a collective team, we are all dreamy eyed about the succesful Project Go live Day, we are usually making plans about .. "jab Go Live hogaa toh ...!!!"

MERGER IT IS

The customer has User Acceptance Testing Lined up, with Users from Circles travelling to Pune for the same. In my years of Software, Process and Service Delivery, I believe that the "Customer is KING"! User Acceptance Testing is nearing about 85% completion of a project in SDLC. It should only be done on COMPLETE Code Build. In a running or Legacy Software, End Users are far more smarter about the screens, fields and workflows than a Developer and a Tester. They are fully conversant on Existing bugs in a Software and can derail the momentum if we serve them half code!!!

On Tuesday we embarked on an ambitious SIT4 and SIT2 Code Merger Plan to make it ONE User Acceptance Testing Ready Server. Easier said than done - we are allowed NO/ minimal Downtime as it will obstruct ongoing Systems Integrated Testing. We have to ensure that on Monday 6 Jan 2020, when Users from 18 Circles descend in UAT Room ALL IS WELL!

I have 2 down, 4 days to go!!!

Cheers,

Jugnu