During the production of XP, we trapped a nasty access violation dead to rights in the IE code. We handed the bug to the dev team in IE and they found the code error right away, told us that it had been there for quite some time and that it was a good catch. Incredibly, they were NOT allowed to check in the fix for the bug because their management denied approval of the fix because WE (the server build lab) were unable to reliably reproduce the AV. That was the reason why it was so nasty, it was hard to get the timing right and so it was hard to catch! But there is was, staring right out of the code! Amazing decision! Fought the good fight in war room and failed. Not to be out done, one of the developers in the server team took it upon himself to fix the damn thing anyway and check it in through my lab. We both caught hell for that, him for mucking around in someone else’s code and me for taking it into the build.

I’m no rocket scientist, but difference in mindset between the UI teams and the base and server teams was immense. Rather than fix the bugs, the management mindset for the IE team at the time seemed to be to cover them up with exception handlers. I didn’t fault the IE developer team, there are/were some really good, talented people in that group. Really though, if you aren’t allowed to fix the bugs, then what is the point of caring?

I’m glad I’m not there anymore. As someone once said, it feels so good when you stop pounding your head against concrete because quits hurting so bad.