My manager calls me and says there is a bug that might end up holding the release, and wondered if I can help. He said it was found when testing Colin’s work, but it might not actually be related to his changes.
Colin had been given some other work and he was taking ages on it,so wasn’t available to complete this work himself.
So I call Colin and ask him what this bug is. He sent me the description from the tester (Becky) which was next to useless, he showed me his recent changes, and a specification from his project. Colin assured me that his changes should work, because he just “copied what was already there”.
It seemed like everything I needed, so I got digging into the code and testing it out.
It didn’t take me long before I realised what Colin had done. There were two scenarios that he needed to check. By copying and pasting what he saw in that file; he was just covering one of the scenarios. The other scenario was actually in another file, and he would have realised that if he actually tested it.
The thing is, my first thought was to add a unit test to cover the scenario. I checked for existing unit tests for that file, and there were some existing tests. Colin hadn’t bothered adding additional unit tests; which would have made him realise that his changes didn’t cover both scenarios.
Then days have gone by, the manual testers have finally got round to testing out his changes, and logged this issue just days before the release.
Then I have to save the day once more.
It’s so annoying/stressful when you get given a bug to fix with strict deadlines, but luckily it was very easy to fix. If Colin had shown a bit of effort, then we wouldn’t have been in that situation.
Stranger Coding Tings 