I noticed this morning that after an initial batch of email on the iPhone, received before about 8am, I hadn’t received any more email by 10am. Maybe I’m just not very popular.

What is common about those 8 accounts? Two are on BT, one on Easyspace, one for this blogs domain where I receive emails from the hosting company, one for this blogs email me feature (Is that the one where you get all the abuse? Ed), one from Hotmail, one for Yahoo’s POP3 push thing and one for good old Googles IMAP account. There’s no common service provider there so maybe it’s the O2 EDGE/GPRS network that’s at fault.

As a test I sent a message to all 8 accounts to see how and when the messages were delivered. The Yahoo POP3 push account received the test message within 10 seconds, at the most. The Gmail accounts, which should also have received the messages almost immediately, didn’t get them till 30 minutes later when I forced it to do an email pull. All that means is that you open the inbox and a read is performed. So that looked like Google’s IMAP server was acting like a POP3 server. The two blog email address’s also didn’t get the messages till I performed a pull, as was the case with the Hotmail account but those were expected.

What was interesting was that the test messages to the two BT email address’s were delivered almost immediately. I had a look at the BT web pages for my account and couldn’t see any mention of them pushing push technology. I wonder.

I’m pretty sure that the iPhone, which I have set to retrieve email every 30 minutes, does so on the hour and at 30 minutes passed. I sent the email to the 8 addresses at 10:15. So what happened. Maybe there’s an issue with the iPhone performing ad-hoc email retrievals or maybe BT have implemented some kind of push thing. Who knows.

The project, while it has brief periods of stability, is about as wobbly as a jelly on a rollercoaster.

Just about anything some of our developers touch goes wrong. Write some new functionality and its riddled with bugs. Fix a bug and they introduce a couple more. Generate a build for the test environment and it is just about guaranteed to fall over. We have regression scripts coming out of our ears. Talk about smoke test, we need to do a plume test, prior to a whiff test then maybe consider a smoke test. And all of that before we have done any work to progress the application.

Some of the developers are good, and helpful and all the usual things you hoped most developers are these days. Some are just so downright sloppy and just about destructive.

There is a lot of time wasted by these guys too. They will spend half an hour at a stretch yakking about some garbage. One of them took delivery of a remote controlled model car today and started messing with it in the office. Give me strength. He was also lectured by somebody from the IT directors office that they don’t want to find that he’s screwing the project by firing off horrendous resource hog background processes that are slowing the project to a crawl. Seems that that may have happened before.

The trouble is that the company are scared whitless in case these developers leave. With that thinking they can get away with whatever they like. What I call holding the company to ransom. The guy who was racing his remote control model car is one of their top developers and he’s also one who is forever busting stuff when trying to clear up some issue. It’s a .net project so you can’t accuse these people of being a bunch of old washed up mainframe developers, far from it. The technology they use I’m happy to put on my resume.

And these guys are geeks. Some of them have been playing World of Warcraft since it was in beta and have all the latest gadgets going. Most have several PC’s at home and they hate MAC’s and iPhones. These guys are fully paid up space age nerds and proud of it but they think that they are better at development than they really are. In fact a lot of the time they’re just hopeless at it.

What is worrying me is that as the project isn’t going that well that someone’s going to want to start finding scapegoats. The obvious scapegoats are the messengers, the testing guys. Somebody will naively think ‘if it wasn’t for those guys this project would be finished, they’re screwing our project’. Also I have a feeling that sooner or later they’re going to say that we are wasting the developers time as so many of the bugs raised can no longer be reproduced and therefore resources are being wasted. That is true, we can’t reproduce a lot of the bugs. The only way the developers respond to anything is if we raise a bug, so we raise bugs on all sorts of issues. A couple of builds later the issues have sometimes disappeared, not because they have been specifically addressed, but because something else has been fixed with the knock on affect that a whole load of other issues miraculously disappear. And nobody knows why.

If the developers read this they would be appalled and hopefully wouldn’t recognise themselves. Something’s gotta give soon. Hopefully the better developers might take over. 

PS I worked on a project once where the developers were so not used to their software being independently tested, and where they had to get us guys in due to various issues, that when they received a torrent of bugs written up on a test management database they responded by saying ‘what right do you have to raise bugs on our software?’. Good stuff.

I got a replacement iPhone from the Apple store but I got the impression they thought it was a homegrown problem, especially when I mentioned XP.

The guy confirmed that the speaker didn’t work, hence phone conversations not working. When I mentioned that neither party could hear anything and therefore that meant that the microphone also couldn’t be working, he brushed that aside as just too much to comprehend. I told him that these various flakey issues must be software (Like the 777 which didn’t land too good at Heathrow last week? Ed) as they have all started since the install of 1.1.3.

The replacement iPhone had version 1.1.2 of the firmware and he did ask me whether I would be upgrading it to 1.1.3. Didn’t take much thinking to answer no to that one. I’ll just wait till 1.1.3.1 or 1.4 arrives. 

Jeez I’ve just had a look at one of these pages via Digg to see what it looked like and how it loaded from there. Oh boy was it slow. It was slower that watching a slow motion rerun of a very slow tortoise’s slow race. Maybe it’s time to get rid of some of these adverts in the channels and only display 1 entry on the page rather than the 6 or 7 I currently show.

I’m surprised anybody reads this with these lousy load times.