The law of seven

I'm just out of a surreal meeting, but altogether too real.

A senior developer has been having lots of problems with some difficult testing. It's basically 300 test cases stacked on top of each other, with some dependencies between them (but few).

The issue is that this testing has been going on for 3 weeks, according to the PM (four weeks now :)), while this senior developer has been tending to the problem for only 1 week.

So, the PM is grilling the developer to stress the urgency and the fact that we're not doing the right thing by stacking those tests together etc -- while the developer emphasizes nitty gritty details about the various stumbling blocks -- because he has run out of high level excuses of what this is still not working ...

At the end of the grilling session, the developer stated he'd do his best to be done by "tomorrow evening" -- and the PM and the developer still don't know what they're doing wrong.

If you want to know what I think, send me $5 by PayPal -- but this is a remarkable failure of communication. No problem is resolved. The developer is working harder than harder and the PM feels sorry for everyone.

This reminds me a "the law of seven" that some PM consultant said once in a class I attended was his way of understanding the problems.
In this law, the PM would grill the project team to understand what is not working. He would not have the technical grasp to understand them at first, so he would keep asking them "why?" -
"Why A ?"
"Well, A is because B and C".
"But why B ?"
"Well, B is because John is vacation and the order was sent late"
"And why C ?"
"Well, this is because the compiler fails on case D."
"Why D ? "...

after the 7th why, the consultant asserted, it started to be pretty clear whether the issue is something the project team could have an impact/leverage on and how -- or if that was an issue the project team could have no impact/leverage on.

That sounds like good advice -- if you know to ask the right questions -- and if the developer is not over-emphasizing petty details to "excuse his lack of success".
But after 3 weeks practicing the law of seven, I don't think it works that well...

Lesson learned: remember the law of seven -- and get wise as to when communication is not working...