How to deal with an uncooperative colleague and raise it to management without playing the blame game?

Hey /softwaredevelopment!

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A bit of background

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I work for a large software company as a Test Automation Engineer. With myself and another senior on my team, who has been mentoring me since I joined 9 months ago. Usually we work really well together, however we've been asked to implement a new test automation framework for an existing codebase, and as of late, I've found him extremely difficult to deal with, to the point where it's having an effect on my mental health, and general motivation to come into work.

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The Problem

As mentioned, we've been asked to implement a new test automation framework, as we've been seeing multiple issues during our release pipeline with flaky tests. An initial prototype was done by the senior, the work was planned and put into sprint, and everything seemed fine. This framework had already been done before in another codebase which I worked on with him, so his idea was to pull the necessary code from codebase A, and use it in codebase B.

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The senior worked on the prototype by himself for a week or two before concluding we can start working on tests for it as part of sprint. So, I picked up my first ticket, everything was going fine, however after a week, I came across an issue that required pairing, as I wasn't sure how to debug and progress. After another 2 weeks, we finally managed to get across the issue.

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I was pretty pissed off at this point, having just spent almost 3 weeks on 1 ticket, as that's never happened to me on that scale before, however he insisted that the issues were fixed, and everything should be plane sailing.

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I reluctantly started work on another ticket, which went well, before I came into more issues, and am still currently working on, after another ridiculous 3 weeks.

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The problem is that during my implementation, he keeps changing the scope of his ticket on how the underlying framework works, which has meant while my ticket was ready to PR during week 1, I've had to refactor my work 2/3 times, as his PR would effectively cause mine to break. I've made this clear to him that we should be delivering an MVP, and then make alterations to the framework later as part of another PR, so that we're not going in an endless cycle of working on the same ticket doing endless refactoring.

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I've made him aware that I'd also like to pair on this new issue, as I know what's causing it, I'm just not sure the best way to proceed. However he now insists he's 'too busy' to pair, and that we can look at it next week (with a new excuse pretty much whenever the time comes). As I refuse to sit twiddling my thumbs, I'll ask him if there's anything else I can pick-up, and he suggested that I help a developer on our team with an issue they were facing (something my manager asked him to do that same day…).

I've raised my points to my manager about this work, who's been really supportive, however, I'm yet to express my issues with this colleague. I have a meeting tomorrow with the the senior, as well as upper management to discuss our progress so far.

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What's the best cause of action for making my experience known?

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Mainly:

1 – A lot more planning should've been involved, rather than blindly assuming this prototype would like like the other codebase

2 – No plan was put in place with the conventions for the new framework, meaning the senior was constantly refactoring the framework.

3 – Senior generally just being very unsupportive and co-operative, despite the fact he's been leading the this.

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Sorry if this was hard to follow, if anythings unclear, I'm happy to elaborate!

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Cheers!

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