Once again one of my stupid "I overlooked that" bugs made me and my company look bad in the eyes of a customer; and me feel miserable, because I do know better than that...

I quickly implemented a change to our CMS, allowing our customer to manually affect a certain behaviour, if it (the customer ;) wishes to do so. As to not effect other customers, this allowance can be switched on and off.

Alas, if switched off, information was deleted due to an Exception thrown in absence of the optional parameter.

The problem is I only thought I tested all cases; I obviously didn't (falling sick doesn't help focus, but is a weak excuse). My colleague, who put my changes onto the live server didn't tested all cases either; trusting me or being lazy or probably both, who knows.

I tried here and there to introduce unit- and integration-tests to our development-procedures and failed miserably. This incident did provide another reason and another proof that I nevertheless have to automate our test-environment...

...or become butcher or carpenter

Update: (2004/05/13) Thanks for your input and consolation; it is greatly appriciated.

After a good nights sleep, the world looks bit better than yesterday; and there's a meeting scheduled for next week, to see what we all can agree upon to change in our development-method to gain an enhanced quality output without sacrificing too much speed (in total reaction-/release-time) or to increase needed effort too much. Maybe this time...

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.