Branon‘s boss, Steve, came storming into his cube. From the look of panic on his face, it was clear that this was a full hair-on-fire emergency.
“Did we change anything this weekend?”
“No,” Branon said. “We never deploy on a weekend.”
“Well, something must have changed?!”
After a few rounds of this, Steve’s panic wore off and he explained a bit more clearly. Every night, their application was supposed to generate a set of nightly reports and emailed them out. These reports went to a number of people in the company, up to and including the CEO. Come Monday morning, the CEO checked his inbox and horror of horror- there was no report!
“And going back through people’s inboxes, this seems like it’s been a problem for months- nobody seems to have received one for months.”
“Why are they just noticing now?” Branon asked.
“That’s really not the problem here. Can you investigate why the emails aren’t going out?”
Branon put aside his concerns, and agreed to dig through and debug the problem. Given that it involved sending emails, Branon was ready to spend a long time trying to debug whatever was going wrong in the chain. Instead, finding the problem only took about two minutes, and most of that was spent getting coffee.
public void Send()
{
}
This application had been in production over a year. This function had not been modified in that time. So while it’s technically true that no one had received a report “for months” (16 months is a number of months), it would probably have been more accurate to say that they had never received a report. Now, given that it had been over a year, you’d think that maybe this report wasn’t that important, but now that the CEO had noticed, it was the most important thing at the company. Work on everything else stopped until this was done- mind you, it only took one person a few hours to implement and test the feature, but still- work on everything else stopped.
A few weeks later a new ticket was opened: people felt that the nightly reports were too frequent, and wanted to instead just go to the site to pull the report, which is what they had been doing for the past 16 months.
Remy Porter
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