Random Thoughts on Life

Yet another rodent ...

So two weeks ago, I was assigned a urgent priority defect. This defect was in the external interface to our finance package. When it was being taken off-line, it would abnormally terminate resulting in a support call (it is not a user clearable issue.) For most of our clients taking this off-line is a weekly event, so this really was an urgent issue. After some digging around, I finally determined the root of the issue actually occurred when the software was being taken on-line. (I'll put up a separate post with the technical explanation.) The specific code was very familiar to me, I had peer reviewed it when it was first added to the system. My initial review was that the code had a potential timing issue, and should be re-worked to account for the potentiality of it being run in parallel. It turns out this defect was exactly that timing issue! When I went back to the summarized notes, it turns out the reason for not making the recommended change was stated as, "the process that utilizes this code runs serialized, not in parallel." Two weeks wasted to find, fix, validate, peer, QA test, and push out the the clients yet another rodent from the stray cat.

posted by MrPopman @ 5:22 PM