I was in a teleconference meeting yesterday for the project that we locally call the Beast (both because of its acronym and because it's a pain in the ass). The Beast's customer is a government agency that, because this is a public blog, I won't actually spell out for you, but let's just say its primary mission is security. Which has been highlighted for us repeatedly -- everyone on the project has had to apply for a Top Secret clearance.
So I'm in this meeting and the project manager says something that grabs my attention. It grabbed a few other peoples' attention, too, so we made him say it again. It turns out that quite a few people on the project had enabled the digital signature option on Outlook, so their emails include a signature attachment... and our customer has asked us to stop doing that, because their system doesn't like our certificate and they find it to be an annoyance.
...So our security-obsessed customer -- a customer responsible for a whole host of irritating, time-wasting, and questionably effective security measures across the country and the globe -- wants us to send less secure emails because they don't want to deal with the annoyance.
Irony, for the win!
(To be fair, their software doesn't like our certificate because my company issues its own certificates, which is a security no-no -- really, certs should be issued by a trusted third party. So my company's home-grown cert authority isn't on the customer's whitelist, and it shouldn't be, really. But I'm still amused by the notion.)
A few weeks ago, the same project manager (PM) asked me to set up a database for our risk management activities.
As a QA manager, I approve of the notion. Risks should be documented, analyzed, mitigated, and tracked until they're no longer worth worrying about, especially on a project of this size.
I disapprove of the specific database he wanted me to use, however. It's a little bigger than what we need, and he's never used it before and neither has anyone else in the project, so we're coming into it blind. Worse, it was an Access database home-grown by a couple of guys who work for the company about four years ago, and since they put it out on the company server for general consumption (I approve of reusable tools, generally), both of them have left the company and the company has pushed us into the next version of Microsoft Office (including Access).
I argued against using this database and offered up a spreadsheet that the projects within my office have been using for years with plenty of effectiveness.
Alas, the PM disdained my spreadsheet (our office is only about 1/3 of the Beast project, so the PM isn't based in our office). He wanted this database, because the database comes with reports and graphs and whiz-bang factor. I grumbled and muttered, but I set the damn thing up for him. (The two guys who wrote it, however many years ago, at least left it with moderately useful documentation.)
Yesterday afternoon, I got an email from the PM that more or less boiled down to, "Hey, Liz, you know that risk database you didn't like that I made you set up anyway? It doesn't work. I need you to fix it."
Yeah, that's full of win. Though it's not irony. Just a headache.
I did fix it, though. (There was a setting that I thought existed for the purpose of setting some defaults, and I didn't set it because the defaults I wanted were already in place, but it turns out the setting itself is actually used by some calculation or other... Which is bad programming -- if you're going to use something, you need to give it a default value in case your user doesn't feel like changing it.)
Gods, but I hate the Beast...
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