Extreme politics in IT. I didn't know that it was clique-ish until I found myself out of the clique. One day, management's friend came to work there and when I met with him to show him the ropes and talk about processes etc., as I was told that we would do together, he said, 'I've already worked here. is my best friend. She will give me anything I want. I don't need to hear your view. ' Until then, I'd always thought my boss was fair and would always get both sides to find the truth. In the coming months, I found out how very wrong I was. Even after this guy was found out and left the Company, my boss treated me like I was the problem. It didn't matter how much proof existed to the contrary.
Examples:
I met with boss on suggestion for process, and then 2 other QA's on Team. I documented what we all agreed on and sent in email for approval, they all responded with their approvals. Fast forward to a meeting regarding about 10 test cases that came up in an Audit to be fixed. The guy lied about his and they were let go. I had one. It was a test case in the current Release in progress and was marked in Design, as it should be, without rows. I had the queries written, it would take less than 10 minutes to complete but I was working other testing priorities for the current Release and had planned to complete it when finished while UAT was in progress. They told me I was out of line, they never signed any process regarding it, never heard of it or agreed to it. It didn't matter that I had proof. They actually sat and laughed at me together to my face in the meeting and I was expected to just tolerate them.
2. A workflow was implemented for a new Feature that didn't make sense to me. I went to the SA (my bosses favorite person) who wrote the User Story and gave her a demo of it. She said that was what was expected. I documented it in the User Story for others. 2 minutes into UAT Testing, she announced that this was wrong. My boss sent emails raging on why testing didn't find it. We did find it but he wouldn't listen. He held a meeting with the entire Team on our failure, and said that Testing needed to do better. The SA found my notes much later, remembered and apologized to me. Not the boss, but he knew the entire time and it didn't matter.
3. They didn't want to put one enhancement in User Stories so were using my personal testing notes to track status. I was asked to give a status on anything. One day we needed to deploy a minor fix that hadn't gone through prior as expected. It was off hours - which you are expected to work. I sent my boss a text, updated my spreadsheet where they were tracking, gave a status the next morning in Stand-Up and sent a follow-up email. 4 statuses in less than 1 hour of the actual work day. I received a scathing email reply (copying the whole team) off of my email from the SA (now the Scrummaster) saying that if we continued to refuse or were incapable of providing statuses and keep her in the loop then she was going to have to take extreme measures. I replied in return asking for a meeting to find out exactly what she wanted. I gave 4 statuses on it in less than an hour of her workday. The email was full of anger and chastising so clearly she isn't getting what she wants but what is it? My boss responded with pure anger and said that I was over-reacting and too sensitive. I requested a meeting to discuss a clear problem since I received a scathing email but he says I am the one too sensitive? He couldn't argue so did his usual thing of diving into my work to find anything wrong that he can throw at me. One of the major things he came up with was a calculation in my personal Testing notes that was a subtraction. I used the hyphen - in place of writing out the word minus. His only goal was that he needed to show the Team that he supported the SA (in his clique) and not me. This happened over and over. The SAs or anyone in his clique could say or do whatever they wanted. My boss himself wasn't above acting any of it.
Stay in the clique if you go. Keep your head down, smile and pretend. Do NOT give your opinion if it's opposite them.