Developing

v1.0

Developing meant coding in Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio. Checking code into an SVN release branch. No unit testing as it would slow down productivity :).

When I began you get assigned tickets and have a quick meeting with the development manager and lead to discuss requirements. You head off to a corner and hack away. At some point you would declare "Code Complete" and the ticket and code would be queued until QA had bandwidth to test it.

I remember times when a ticket would come back to me rejected and I totally forgot what the ticket was about. Sometimes, the reject would come attached with the wrath of the development manager which didn't do much to make me a better part of the team. Being a senior developer, the wrath or anger from a manager didn't do much to change me either. I was a Marine there aren't too many mortals that can give you hell like a Marine Corps Gunny, but I felt for the rest of my team that had to endure negativity because of our imperfection.

v1.1

The development manager had a pretty good idea that helped accelerate feedback on tickets. He assigned testing to developers who were responsible for "development testing" before the ticket was shipped to QA. There was no way for developers to instantly be as good as QA who test the application all day, but developer testers were able to catch those major functional glitches that would sometimes creep across to QA while providing quicker feedback on the tickets.

The development manager was less stressful about rejections and focused more on preventing rejections.