Software development is still an industry that is still in it's infancy. I know there are a lot of computer scientists out there. I know a few of them. These guys and girls are just as inquisitive as I am about working with computers and how they work. And sometimes, like me, they encounter a phenomenon that fails to reproduce itself. Or if it reproduces itself it mysteriously vanishes back into the ether.
At our company we ship regularly. But our clients are quite slow at the uptake when it comes to deployment. I recently had a client with 2 previous versions of software in the testing pipeline. That means when they encounter a bug we fixed in a later version they can only complain about it. It sort of makes us look bad because the end user thinks we are unresponsive and slow.
Recently, after an update we encountered a bug that defied every method we tried to fix it with. What made it worse is the section of code where it was occuring hadn't been touched in this release so the bug couldn't have come from there. And it was only coming from a few servers. So we had no idea why it would occur on one server and not another. After much trial and error we discovered there might be a bug not in our software but in the operating system. After getting all the clients to run a serious of patches that may not work. We were in luck. The debriefing afterward was more like "blame it on Microsoft... they probably introduced a bug and then corrected it in a system update". Yeah, we blamed it on someone else.
Posted by yardie at June 2, 2008 10:28 AM | TrackBack