Page 2 of Paradigm

“App or browser?”

“Browser,” he replied. “There are three multiple-choice questions in that level, and it’s only happening with one of them. I’m going to look into it now, but since you asked that we let you know if that user reports any more issues, I wanted to tell you.”

“Is it an actual bug, or did they just not clear their damn cache or something?”

“We haven’t gotten any new reports so far, but we only launched that level this morning.”

“They’re quick, huh?” she noted, pulling up the backend on her laptop. “Seventeen?”

“Yup.”

Mitchell took a seat and continued to eat.

“What language?”

“English,” he said.

Arlowe pulled up what she needed, searched the code in their English section, found level seventeen, and scanned over what was there.

“Who did this one?”

“One of the contractors.”

“It’s wrong. How did this get through QE?” she asked of their quality engineers, of whom they had two on staff.

“I don’t know. Want me to talk to them?”

“Grab them, and let’s all meet. Get the whole team; minus the contractors, obviously. I want to find out why this subscriber continues to find bugs and issues in our software that we’re not finding ourselves before we ship things out. I was the one who insisted on two quality engineers specifically to avoid this kind of thing instead of hiring more product engineers to build stuff first. This should’ve been spotted right away. I’ll fix it, but then, I want to have a meeting with everyone.”

“I’ll let them know,” Mitchell said. “What conference room do you want them in?”

“Rotterdam,” she replied.

They had chosen to name their conference rooms after cities in the Netherlands since that was where their founders had met and formed their friendship.

“You’ve got it.”

“And can you get me one of those burritos, too?”

“Sure.”

“Heat it up first, Mitch. Follow the instructions on the wrapper. I’m not breaking my teeth on it.”

Mitchell laughed before he stood and walked out of her office, and Arlowe shook her head then. Her team had been so busy, they were missing things. She might be able to convince Violet to let her hire at least one more person full-time, but before she went that route, she wanted to make sure that she reviewed all of their processes to see if the QE team she’d hired was going to work out. This EngineE, the user who had been reporting issues into their very small support team, had technically been doing them some favors, which Arlowe appreciated, but she also hated that they were having this many issues that required reporting.

She fixed three simple lines of code that should’ve been changed prior to the update being pushed live and carried her laptop into the Rotterdam conference room. There, she sat down, pulled up the code on the big screen behind her to make sure that she would get her point across, and waited for the tiny but mighty engineering team, which she’d once been the only member of, to arrive.

When they did, Arlowe simply pointed above her head at the side-by-side view she’d put up and said, “On the left, there’s an issue. On the right, it’s fixed. Who can find it?”

She then let her team take a minute to examine the code and thanked Mitchell, who set a plate down with a burrito on it for her.

“Oh, this is English. Level seventeen,” one of the engineers said.

“Yes, level seventeen. Kind of hard to play the game if you can’t move beyond one of the questions. Can someone tell me what’s wrong with it?”

“No correct answer in the code,” another one said.

“Yes,” Arlowe confirmed. “The answer was D, but the answer field here is blank, so it wouldn’t move the user forward. We cannot miss stuff like this… QE, what happened? Walk me through our process when it comes to verifying game questions and answers.”