The other day at work an interesting thing happened. I was working with someone else in order to troubleshoot an issue with pushing some software out to our live site. I had tested my changes on my local machine as well as the test site. So we rolled things out to an external test site so our client could preview the changes before we flipped the final switch. Drum roll please …
Nothing worked. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Kablooey.
Been there?
When things like that happen as a developer .. heck in any part of IT .. shoot, in ANY field now that I think about … it’s not a good day.
However, things all worked out, in the end. And here is a tip that helped me get through it.
This an excerpt from my upcoming freebie with some advice on handling days like that in IT, but really this works for pretty much anything where you have a problem that just seems like things should be working but they inexplicably don’t.
“ Test to the END, each time, EVERY time – never assume you know how it will end. ”
Now I know YOU’VE never NOT done that right? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Ahem.
We’ve all assumed we know what our code is going to do based on a change. We think it about 3 levels deep, very quickly, and convince ourselves that “yeah, it’ll be fiiiiiine”. The we discover, during a bunch of stress, that we should have thought about 7 levels deep instead.
Don’t convince yourself that you don’t have time to test. It’s the least stress. Yes it’s boring but I’d rather be a little bored and KNOW something will work, than have the boss leaning over my shoulder during a rollout, asking me when a site is going to be back up.
Test.
Test.
To the end.
And that’s where we are. The End. See you next time!