Getting Access to the Code

Right now I am working on a tiger team to research why this new reporting system has different data than the old one. Most of the time I try to figure out what exactly is the complaint. The customers speak in a code of sorts. And lots of the tickets are written with the perspective of the new data loading system.

Now I did do a stint on the new data loading system for a few years. And I spent half my career on the old system. I think that is why they have me doing the research here. There is this one small database that I don't have much experience with. All the values in one certain field in it differed between the two systems. Hmm.

I found some documentation for the old system. Something looked screwy. There was an input field from a COBOL program that produced a values in dollars. However in the old system target database, they seemed to be storing dollars and cents. The cents portion was not zero. Felt like a defect to me.

To truly declare this a bug, I needed to look at the source code. Oops. The source code is only available on this Solaris UNIX system. Okay. I got access to a common account on there. Nope. You got to have a personal account to get access to the code. I tried to log in. Wrong password. I requested a new password.

Eventually after a second password reset, I got access to the UNIX. They got some Perl shell script to create a view to the code. Ran the script successfully. But where the heck is the source code. Turns out it gets stored on some shared storage off on the network. Whew. Tough job just getting to the darn source code.