I was off helping the test team duplicate a problem. Then I tried running back to my desk to help a developer with a compile problem. I got stopped in the hall by another team that was having problems. They said their job did not complete in the production environment. And they saw some errors in a log that looked like it was my code.So I took a look at the errors. And I confessed that they were warnings that my code put out. But I wrote that stuff 2 years ago. I told them what I remembered, but said we could go to my desk and find out for sure in about 5 minutes. These guys were very happy with that. So I pulled up my code, showed them where I caught and logged the problems, and demonstrated that this had nothing to do with their job not completing in production.
These guys said they believed me, but wanted to look at my code any way. Hey I got nothing to hide. So I emailed it to them. I am sure they will arrive at the same conclusion as me. Late in the afternoon I heard a ruckus coming from a cubicle down the hall. Apparently they found the source of the problem. There were duplicate records sent to us from an external mainframe job. Their software was not written to handle such duplicates. And all kinds of people were making calls to various members in our customer organization to figure out what we could do.
It was a bit funny. The lead technical guy from the customer organization was old golfing. They called his wife to see if the golfer could call us back. Then they called the number 2 technical guy who had no real authority. LOL. They talked this guy into calling his boss, and his boss' boss on their cell phones. Eventually they got through to somebody who could approve a plan to eliminate the duplicate data. Normally we are not allowed to do things like that with the production data unless the customer approves. There must have been upwards of 10 people crammed in a cubicle calling the customers to get to the final resolution for this problem. In the end they had a trouble ticket opened up on the mainframe job that was sending us the duplicates erroneously.
I guess there is a rush to knock out any problems like this quickly, because tomorrow is the last day for our company on the contract. Another company won the maintenance contract. I did my part by fixing one last bug that I had previously projected would not be done before we exited. Unfortunately the other developers on my team could not resolve their problems, so they will most likely be fixed by the next company (or languish until the next company comes up to speed).
