One of the bugs I was verifying included a very helpful dev comment in the bug report. The dev wrote:

“I came across this one and thought I'd just knock it out. No big deal, easy to do, easier to test.”

If you saw this dev comment in a bug report, what would you do? I’ll tell you what I did… sat down at my desk, rubbed my hands together like a fly, then attacked that fix like the world was watching. After a few tests I found the oversight I was expecting.

“thought I’d just knock it out”
“no big deal”
“easy to do”

….maybe that’s just a developer’s way of saying “Be careful, I did no testing whatsoever on this”.

4 comments:

  1. Devon Smith said...

    It is nice of them when they let us know they did something quickly and in a hurry :)

    I love their optimism, but I love injecting a little realism also: http://ladybug010.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/developers-a-ray-of-sunshine/

  2. Adam said...

    I'd get the code rolled out. :)

    You wouldn't gift wrap your garbage would you? (channeling Jerry Weinberg secrets of consulting)

  3. Adam said...

    I'd also ask the developer to show me proof of the bug without their fix and what they did to test their fix after applying the code.


    Here is a great question which someone on my team started using

    "What other areas of the product might this affect that we should re-test?"

  4. Matthew said...

    heh. There's a section of a Weinberg book - I think it's "becoming a technical leader", where he talks about human interaction. His example is similar - if a dev says "oh no, no need to test that, I'm SURE it's fine" or "the software is failing, we need to find the source of the error, but i'm SURE it's not section A. Let's not waste our time looking there." In both cases, where do you think the bug will be? :-)

    Best of all, you made your point /succinctly/. Man, I envy you that! :-)



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