http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=352687

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

to fix it and put it online took minutes, but I'm still feeling kind of unprofessional,
tomte


An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
-- Albert Camus

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...