Once a year “Reproducible” Bug

Wishing all my readers a Happy, Healthy and Wealthy New Year 2011.

Recently, I was discussing, with my wife, some great defects that we are finding while performing our regular testing. She interestingly narrated me a scenario where one of her company’s customers is getting a defect on regular basis. Now the definition of “Regular basis” is very unique. Those guys are getting a specific defect every year and that too, on March month. Initially, I was surprised to listen to this. But once I drilled down the topic, I came to know that the customer is a financial organization. The application that they are using might be having some load/stress scenarios in the month of March every year. Since it is financial year closing in India in March, the scenario is 100% reproducible yearly.

When I queried about the resolution and proposed solutions for that defect with my wife, she said that they are trying to get the logs for all the actions that will occur in that specific month so that they can analyze the issue and resolve it. Ironically, the issue is reproducible in the customer premise from the last 4 years. But still not detectable.

I have seen reproducible issues, un-reproducible issues, hard to reproducible issues but this is the first time I heard about “Once a year reproducible issue”. Actually, this is something which is not very common in current market. But there are some Telecom applications that always got crashed in festival time in India like Diwali or New Year. I witnessed the same many times in my profession life. 6 years back, I have seen the Telephone Network Choking in the office of India’s one of the biggest telecom service provider company. When screwed that issue, I came to know from the senior management that this is how it is working at the festival times from the last 7 yrs. When discussed about the solutions, the company was not willing to spend the amount that is required to upgrade the system which redirects towards the solution of the problem.

Actually, the solution of these kinds of issues, or in fact any kind of issue, totally depends on the size of the customer. If we are getting a good business (obviously it means good money) from our customers, we would spend time to resolve the issues immediately even if the issue is “Once a year Reproducible defect”. It all depends on business which eventually converts into money.

Money matters all. That’s the key of business, in fact key of life – professionally and personally.

-- Sanat Sharma