About two weeks ago, business as usual, I installed a latest build to notice that clearly someone from some other team had worked on our user interface. Whatever we had done to make it nice enough had been replaced by problems I did not quite understand. Reporting the issue to offload, and focusing on other things of relevance.
With communication through various steps on what was the status, we got the word that it would be fixed soon. Days passed, and soon wasn't soon enough. We finished another feature we needed to release, and a thing of temporary annoyance turned into release blocker.
Friday afternoon, I decided to take a moment on the legwork to learn first that the developer making the changes left for a three weeks of vacation, and the second developer had very much partial knowledge on how the changes he would contribute made their way into the build. He also pointed out that he fixed "the issue" three hours ago and sent whatever he was doing over email to the one now on vacation.
Asking around a little more, I learned that the thing was that was sent over email, and where it belonged - and that it was in place, yet problems still persisted. I learned to do the necessary tweaks there myself - all I needed was to know what to tweak.
Monday started with fierce determination to get the problem over and done with. I sat down with the second developer to show him what I saw in the product, and he showed me what he saw in his component test environment. It because very obvious that the simulator he was running was not a match to the real end user environment with the problem. We narrowed down the problem into seven lines of CSS and eventually one line of CSS.
The mystery started to unfold. The second developer would provide a piece of stylesheet that was correct. By the time it was in the product, it was incorrect. If it was as it was originally given, there would be no problem.
Hunting down a bunch of Jenkins jobs in the pipeline, I learned the problem was on encoding a particular character that shouldn't get encoded. Speculating on the field that got encoded, we realized removing the encoding would have further effects. What came about was a funny one-hour experimenting with what could possibly work. The speculative solutions of hundreds of characters without a meaning and an argument about clear code vs. comments later, we found one that made sense and fixed it.
It all started with the idea of a bug that needed fixing. It continued to realizing that in a long chain of new and old pieces, ownership wouldn't be straightforward. And I did what we all do in our turn: identify a gap, fill the gap and collaborate on getting things forward.
In addition to finding the gap, I sat next to people to get the gap filled. I don't need to be assigned responsible to be responsible.
I could easily still be waiting but I'm not: I fixed the bug.
