Friday, March 17, 2006

"This is Team-work"

I would like to share something which stands out as a good example of what real teamwork is.
I was working on the database of the project (the same which occurred in my previous post). I was working on a trial version of Toad software, an SQL database tool. I had to type in same values in a particular column across multiple rows. To reduce my work, I just entered one word in each cell of the column.
Once I had completed the data entry, I wrote an SQL query to replace the word by the desired phrase. To my surprise, only one of the 18 cells was edited by the query. I tried again & nothing further happened. Confused, I called one of my senior to see into the problem. She has a very good hold on SQL queries. She typed in a complex query. And the result came. A result that none of us neither wanted, nor expected. All the cells in that particular column had changed to zero!!!
I know that the query that was given did not include anything like 'zero', ‘nil’, 'null' etc. But still both of us were staring at the screen bewildered.
Though I had a backup of the data, but copying from the backup to this database will mean that whatever I had done for the last 4 hours will be lost.
As I prepared myself to copy from the backup, my QA team-mate Sowmya Ambiti came to see what has been happening. When I explained the problem, she smiled, told me to relax and take a 30 minutes break. She took upon restoring the data to herself, even without my asking. She copied the data from the backup, in such a smart way that the data loss was minimal. I had not lost entire 4 hours work, but only what I could redo in a few minutes.
Sowmya denied acknowledging any praise for the work that she did. She just told me, “This is team-work”. I had no words to express my feelings…….

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Prashant,

I strongly beleive this quote on Team work :

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
-Henry Ford