Last week a developer on the team released a fix to a big problem in production. The users were anxious to experience the fix. As soon as the fixed was implemented, they got on and tried the application. Something was not right. The customer called my manager. My manager put a bunch of us on the problem.The first guy to respond said he had no idea what the customer was talking about. The second guy was silent. So I jumped in. That was the beginning of a nightmare. Here is a fine point from the story. The user complained that the application just froze. Ouch.
I got our DBA team on this problem. The user said the app froze. That must mean that there was a performance problem. The DBA could not see anything wrong. There were no locks or anything. We got some conference calls going with the user. I reverted back to asking the users exactly what they were doing, what they were seeing, and what they expected to see.
Then it because obvious. There was no performance problem. The user was expecting some control to be enabled. They were not getting enabled. The customer calls this "frozen". I call it controls not acting correctly. They are disabled. They will never get enabled unless we fix the problem. This is different from a database call being blocked by another transaction. We eventually developed a fix for the customer. But that is a story for a different post.
