Ping pong
How do you “ping pong” in software development?
1. You have a bug.
2. The bug is hardly reproducible, but when reproduced it appears to be very serious.
3. There are a number of teams involved in the functionality where the bug is found.
As a result what actually happens in most of the cases is “ping pong”. This bug is constantly moved from one owner to another and vice versa. Nobody really wants to spend a decent amount of resource to investigate and resolve this issue. And even if someone do, the problem might require the right person for the job which is actually difficult to achieve. And this can continue for years. From one version to another where surrounding code is constantly changing and evolving which makes it even harder to investigate. And if you have an extensible environment as Eclipse, where one user can have a completely different set of plug-ins from another, the task is nearly impossible.
Last week I came to such a problem.
1. A file in the workspace could not be deleted.
2. The bug was first reported 2 years ago and a number of times after that, but it could never be reproduced.
3. More then 5 teams have code that is “processing” this file. Teams were constantly changing and evolving for the last 2 years so even the knowhow is not concentrated.
If a file can not be deleted there must be a handle open for this file. It took us about 2 minutes to download JPicus from the update site and create a snapshot of open handles and failed delete operations in the installation where the problem was reproduced.
There was a failed delete operation for a file and JPicus shows 5 handles for this file one of which is “still open”.
Selecting the handle you can see the stack trace of opening the handle in Thread View.
Having the stack trace and delegating to the right team an hour later the bug is investigated and a solution is pending.
Posted August 10th, 2009 by kiril in category: JPicus
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