Re: Same as Audits
If the auditors don't find something to report, they're liable to inflate something irrelevant into an issue that they can report on.
This is true.
Some 15 years ago a PHB decided it would be fine and dandy idea to hold a software standards audit. Those of us who knew that for the entire previous decade he'd consistently refused to allow us to build documentation time into project schedules glared daggers at him, but the proposal was accepted by senior management, the money was conjured seemingly out of nowhere and the auditors appointed (a famous company whose name begins with 'L' and ends with 'bastards').
Three months later we submitted all our source code, documentation, working procedures, standards, QA evaluations, meeting notes, etc, etc to them. Excepting the source code, half of it hadn't existed three months earlier. Interviews commenced, with all staff required to assist to the best of their ability. For a week the auditors poked around our systems, demanding demonstrations of procedures put into practice, all that sort of stuff. It was exhausting but it actually went quite well, although only because of all the preparation we'd put into it.
A month later we got the report. They didn't find (to my mind) any major problems but just a handful of small ones. One of them was with an old Perl script of mine, which unfortunately the lead auditor used as an example at the presentation. His complaint was that the script was unreadable by any normal human, and as such recommended that we revisit our coding standards. Our PHB got on his hind feet to announce that the review would be led by the auditors and they would provide subsequent training sessions to all programmers (no doubt at extra cost). He wasn't pleased with the laughter that provoked, and I had to point out that the auditor was complaining about a script which had been minified (for some reason now lost in the mists of time) and wasn't the version which should have been submitted for auditing -- so sorry.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
