Recently I delivered a new version of an application. I tested it by cloning Production data into my development environment. Then I sent the new application out. Another developer peer reviewed the new app. The app would not work in his development schema. It also did not work for our internal testers.I had committed to a quick release of this application. These testing problems prevented a release. So it was time for me to intervene. The application depends on the database being in a certain state. My own development database was correct. So was production. But the test database was out of sync.
I figured that production gets data when we release database changes to them. So I poured through the database releases from the last year. I found the release that populated the expected records. It apparently had not been run in the test database.
Since the customer needed my fix quickly, I reverse engineered the good database release. A tester acted as a DBA while I gave him directions to bring his database up to date. After that my application changes worked fine.
This turned out to be a database configuration management problem. We need the test database to mimic production. This is a process level problem that needs fixing now. Otherwise I will be back debugging the test environment soon.
