Page 51 of Debugging Love

“It was Danni’s app and now it is my app,” Drew says without glancing away from the computer screen.

“I didn’t notice it everywhere,” I hedge, and then add, “Someone doesn’t always comment her code.” The corners of Danni’s lips are headed in the wrong direction, straight down.

“Show her what we got,” I say, a little less confidently this time.

Drew glances over his shoulder at Danni. “Can you see?”

“Good enough.”

Drew pulls up CompareMe and opens Danni’s project on one side, and his updated project on the right. He clicks the button to expand all the folders and begins scrolling. “We got rid of this. We got rid of these. All of these are gone. Not needed. Nope. Effectively erased.”

Danni’s lips maintain their downward curve.

“We genericized it,” I say. “We pared down the view layers and consolidated the controller into one object to get rid of those dupes you had. Like I was explaining in our meeting this morning.” I continue for a minute, explaining why the consolidated objects make the architecture more robust, less brittle. Her lips don’t budge, so she’s obviously not getting the gist.

“This application is in test,” she says finally, her plump, cherry lips gone, replaced by bloodless, twitchy things.

“This only took a week,” Drew says. He stretches his arms and swings them around, anchoring his hands on the back of his head as he gazes proudly at his improvements.

“Testing was ninety percent complete when I handed this over.” There’s a hard edge to Danni’s voice.

“It still is,” Drew says.

Danni’s knees extend reflexively, her heels sending her chair back a foot. “They have to do a full regression test now!”

Drew shrugs. “If they test one screen, the rest will work because it’s all the same backend.”

“With different validations,” Danni growls.

“We baked those in too.”

I glance between Drew, who’s still lounging back, and Danni, who’s leaning forward, hands clutching her seat cushion, her body as stiff as an Everclear cocktail. I’m actually siding with her on this one. A full regression test is necessary. I say as much.

“So basically, all that time I spent coding and all the time they spent testing was a waste of time and money.”

Drew lifts his hands off his head and says, “Uh, yeah.”

“No,” I counter. “We used your code. Or Drew did.” On second thought, I think I’ll let him take credit for this one. It was his idea. Mostly.

“You deleted half of it and rewrote the other quarter,” Danni counters.

“And now the code maintains itself so JetAero is saving money indefinitely. You are welcome.”

I inch away from Drew.

“Code does not maintain itself,” Danni snaps. “It doesn’t have a brain. And now all my design documents need to be rewritten.”

“I do not do documentation,” Drew says.

Danni throws up her hands and wheels herself backward with a big shove.

“I can look at them,” I offer. I don’t mind technical writing. I’d rather code, but whatever.

“No, you can’t. You’re on the benefits portal project with me,” Danni says, ending the conversation. She stands, grabs the back of her chair, and shoves it to her desk, somehow causing twice the ruckus I caused while rolling it over to Drew’s.

I slouch behind the cubicle partition, place my elbow on my knee, and rest my chin on my fist, determined to hide in Drew’s cube until Danni realizes we didn’t ruin her code, we improved it.

Chapter 13

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