Maybe, but what she’s describing is borderline incompetence. A business rule is something along the lines of a statement that defines the way the business does something, and a test case is something almost entirely different.
I see where she’s coming from, but I think maybe she’s overestimating people’s internal motivations, which is not at all an uncommon problem. I mean, I keep hearing people say that you have to have passion for what you do. And some of them really seem to get up in the morning and have their SpongeBob moment and say “I WANT to test code today.” and walk out the door whistling a happy tune.
Most people don’t. Their jobs are the way they get paid, and through that, enable themselves to do some combination of what they want and provide for their families. They don’t actually ***care ***about what’s getting done- in a year’s time, they will have worked several other projects to completion after the current one. And in a year or two past that, it’s likely they’ll be doing something to replace what they’re putting in today. And unless there’s a good and prompt reward/punishment scheme in place to keep them on track, they’re liable to be only as motivated, hard working and conscientious as necessary to get the job done adequately. Doing a better job actively loses them time and effort, and gains them stress, with no positive results.
Some people don’t work like this- they’re the ones whose internal motivation is centered around doing a good job and being good at what they do. Most people aren’t. Many IT folks are more motivated by the challenge of solving the problem, and lose focus and motivation once that’s done. Some are interested in the learning aspects and couldn’t personally care less if a project works well or not. Some are motivated by status, and working on important, but low status or low visibillity projects is not motivating to them.
Companies try to get everyone on the same page with all sorts of rah-rah corporate culture stuff and slogans and what- not, but for the most part, it’s BS. \
What I have noticed is that upper management tends to have very fixed ideas of how things should work, and when confronted with underlings who think outside the box, they don’t give it adequate consideration because they’re too busy looking in the box and not understanding what this guy is talking about. I seem to be the poster child for this- we’ll have problems, I’ll suggest a solution, be told it’s not feasible, or looked at like I’m insane. Then a few years later, we’ll have a regime change of some sort, or someone will read a magazine article, and suddenly we’ll do exactly what I suggested years earlier. It’s frustrating to an extreme, but considering this has literally happened everywhere I’ve ever worked, I’m resigned to it.
What does frustrate me are coworkers who have zero initiative. I don’t mean in terms of volunteering, or taking charge, or anything like that. I mean the ones who just won’t even dig in and figure out things to do their own jobs adequately and expect everything to be served up on a platter and spoon-fed. I’m a BA just like JCWoman, and we have developers who pull this crap all the time. A requirement may not be 100% clear, or there’s some technical design that needs to be done that’s out of scope of the BA’s role or knowledge, and they’ll basically sit on their hands, claim the requirements were unclear, or that they don’t know what environment to use, or whatever. Never mind that they didn’t ask a single question, or try anything out, or put out any effort whatsoever to try and remedy the situation. Nope- they’ll just blame someone else.
- we won’t have ANY issues if they find out. I left with “I really don’t want to give a deposition, I’ve done it before and they suck.”).