Timing is Everything

I was assigned a tricky problem to work on. Some of the data was missing in our production environment. Everything seemed to work fine in development and test. Trouble is, I did not have access to the production environment. I got someone to run some queries on my behalf.
 
The source data was correct. The target tables had records inserted. But they were missing key fields. This was quite the mystery. I had to back up and look at the big picture. Normally this is not needed. But in this case, it was crucial.
 
We have some main data loaded into some staging tables. Then some processes run after the initial load that collect all the data and stuff it into a couple main tables. Then those main table are copied to the reporting machine. It is here that my jobs run to mine the main tables to update the reporting tables.
 
Turns out the copy to the reporting machine is delayed every so often. Wouldn’t you know it? My jobs are not actually scheduled to wait until the copying of source data is completed. Usually it happens way before my jobs run. But not always.
 
The fix is to add in the dependency, and fix all those records that got loaded with blanks. The hard part of this problem was figuring out the source of the problem. Wasn’t really a coding issue. More a timing issue.

You're Doing It Wrong

I got on a conference call for our latest software release. The new project manager asked the test team to verify a bunch of tickets. A bunch came out failed and ended in my queue. The manager asked me if I had any insight on these tickets.

Luckily, any time I do work on a ticket, I enter a note in our ticketing system. I had seen all these tickets before. I researched them and determined a level of effort for them. However none of them got scheduled for a release yet. So the work to resolve the tickets has not even started. Of course they are going to fail if someone tests them now.

I reported what I knew about these tickets. Nobody should have been testing them. The manager said he wanted testing to check the actual state of the problems in the system. Fair enough. But these are not failures. They are in a state where the work has not even started.

At least I am not on the testing team. It is no fund to spend your time testing fixes that have not even be done yet. The good news is that the testers should be ready to verify these as soon as there is a fix. Who knows when that will be?