Version Chaos
Today's submitter, Erica, writes: Every time I tell this story to other developers they don't believe it, because this is quite possibly the dumbest way version control has ever been done.
When Erica joined Initech's mobile team, she came in as a mid-level developer on a team with one senior (Steve) and two interns (Dan and Trevor). Steve wasn't dedicated to the project; in fact, he was 80% on a more important team, so he barely had time for leading the mobile team. It fell to the project manager (Benjamin) to be the technical lead on the project as well as managing the interns. To be fair, this project was mostly meant as a training exercise, something low priority and safe for interns to cut their teeth on. So far, so good.
The app was for Android, and they were using the Flutter SDK, which was at the time on version 0.something and used by almost nobody in the industry-Benjamin's idea. The build was buggy and returned such unhelpful errors that Benjamin couldn't build it on his machine, which was standing in for a CI/CD machine to produce the integrated dev build they were meant to hand off to QA for testing. Rather than taking the chance to teach interns best practices on how to write good code, Benjamin banned code reviews, seeming to believe that any code that ran was good code. Erica's objections fell on deaf ears. She was a girl, what did she know about code? Any time she had a point, such as "Let's not run an entire ecommerce database on a single table", she had to get Dan to say it for her for Benjamin to even halfway consider it.
But none of that is the point of today's story. The true horror of the project lay not in the code quality, but in the version control practices-and I mean both "version control" and "practices" in the loosest sense of the words. Each developer had a branch to work on. Other than Erica, nobody seemed to ever merge master back into their branch. Instead, Benjamin had them each make a pull request at the end of the day into master, and that was the only direction code flowed. So, as you might expect, the branches varied widely within a week or two of this practice.
First thing in the morning, Benjamin would call a team meeting and merge the open pull requests. How would he know which line to take? He'd just ask the developer which line, and take that entire line. As you can imagine, master quickly became an unreadable mess, which is why Benjamin couldn't build from it. Half the time, it wouldn't compile. Erica would merge master into her branch, then spend 2 hours trying to fix everything so it worked, then push her version upstream so Dan could work from her branch. Trevor didn't even bother with her branch, focusing on his own instead, meaning code that worked on his machine bore no resemblance to the code on Erica's. He didn't know any better; he was listening to Benjamin, who was meant to be in charge of the interns.
Sometimes, however, perseverance wins the day. Erica outlived Benjamin on the project, as he finally got moved to something bigger and client-focused. That left her in charge of the interns, with plenty of time to teach them that everything they had learned thus far was wrong.
[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!