in employment pickle, please advise me

teabelly

Find another job. This one won't get better as once you have several people thinking they are your boss then you're up a creak without a paddle.

While you're looking ask the MD who is your immediate boss and only follow what they say you should do. Anyone else asks you to do anything and then you refer them to your immediate boss and say they have to go through them. Will wind everyone up but then they'll have to decide who is in charge. And if you have to drop things for something the MD wants confirm in writing later that is what they want you to do so when deadlines are missed and everyone is playing the blame game then you can point out you said that was what was going to happen. It also means they can't deny they've said something or changed priorities. The audit trail is the best way to hoist these kind of people by their own petard.

getmore4less

20 developers doing 15 active project and a firefighting team on the finished ones with no QA anywhere.

place is stuffed.
Especially as lessons from existing projects have not been learnt

Are some of the simple basics in place like
requirements/specifcations
centralised source code,
change controll,
peer review,
repeatable product/project build processes(Idealy automated from source)
acceptance criteria


One approach is the support team go though acceptance process/handover before they agree to take on any new projects that development say are finished.

The QM role would be perfect for me as when I was a developer in another company we met very high process and documentation standards and I audited it alongside developing so I know how to implement it and govern it. They have never invested in QA and they won't bring a small team in to manage testing and up the quality, in my eyes this is ridiculous

I would be very carefull if you go down this route, the key is to focus on rapid return on investement, quick lightweight process that tackle the key issues, reduce wasted development time and produce projects that are at least feature complete.
You are going to have to show cost savings quickly.

......................................................
Reminded of a couple of stories from a few years back

A QA trainee of mine eventualy needed to move on, got a good job in a company that could offer more opportunities than we had.

They started on a project and did a great job found more problems than the team could fix in time to meet the deadlines, this was he first project for ages that was late.

Problem was that everyone lost their bonus and they became an outcast, all the other test teams allways found problems at a rate that could be fixed, they were in the same bonus pool.

Another place where one developer regularly gets developer of the month/bonus etc. for finishing projects on time, their project are always the ones with the biggest supoort issues, managers can't see the connection.