What a waste of a day

Post #158,946 by bluke 6/8/04 4:50:32 AM Reply	What a waste of a day I just wasted a whole day tracking down a braindead mistake that I made. I am working on performance tuning for our app. As part of that I inserted logging statements into a heavily used piece of code. Basically, we have a base class Element which has a lot of subclasses. Element has a method setAttribute which all the subclasses use, I overrode it in one of the subclasses (Button) to log all the calls so I could get some idea why it was being called so many times. Meanwhile, someone else took my ear file with the logging statements and started running a profiler on it. Suddenly we see something really weird, setAttribute is taking 50% of the time, and not only that but every other subclass of Element that calls it the performance is fine (0.06 ms) but from one class (Button) it is taking much longer (between 2 and 20 ms). We all looked at the code and saw that the method is only in the shared superclass. For a whole day we thought about and tried to figure out why it would be slower in this 1 class. Right now performance is a hot issue so management is involved as well. Finally I took the ear file decompiled the class and lo and behold saw my logging calls. Boy did I feel stupid explaining to my manager that the performance problem we thought that we had and had worked on for a day was caused by my stupidity.
Post #158,947 by deSitter 6/8/04 5:04:54 AM Reply	Re: What a waste of a day In the course of building the Lunar Module, a Grumman engineer made a calculation error that caused the junction of the lander legs and footpads to be made too fragile. In tests, the gear collapsed. The engineer stayed up late one night rechecking his work, and discovered the calculation. In the modern world he'd have immediately attempted to cover his ass. In that world, he reported the problem immediately to his boss, project manager Tom Kelly, and took full responsibility for the costly setback in the project schedule (weight was critical, so any major redesign propagated through the entire project). Kelly said to him - this is bad. But what you did with the information is good. Get back to work. Mistakes are fate. Fessing up is free will. -drl
Post #158,991 by FuManChu 6/8/04 11:04:19 AM Reply	Well put.
Post #159,001 by ben_tilly 6/8/04 11:36:01 AM Reply	And that is a difficult project management skill The natural inclination when someone screws up is to punish them for it. This results in CYA behaviour. And it results in a systemic distortion of bad news into good as you go up the project hierarchy. You really want to encourage 'fessing up. And want to make sure that bad news actually gets discovered. Since neither of these happens naturally, you have to fight to make them happen. Cheers, Ben To deny the indirect purchaser, who in this case is the ultimate purchaser, the right to seek relief from unlawful conduct, would essentially remove the word consumer from the Consumer Protection Act - [link\|http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=1246&Page=1&pagePos=20\|Nebraska Supreme Court]
Post #159,011 by Arkadiy 6/8/04 12:40:50 PM Reply	As a boss of mine put it during a postmortem meeting "There is a price to telling the truth". I no longer work for him. -- Buy high, sell sober.

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