The 5 minute fix
August 14th, 2010
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It was a normal day. The sun rose, birds were singing and everything seemed to be going fine until Kaboom ! A bug appeared in the live environment. Things turned downhill from there that day. But we are more interested in how things got fixed so lets focus on that.
An investigation of the code revealed that the bug had crept in because of a minor mistake. A variable was referring to the wrong column index on a table. ‘Hmmm… simple fix’ I thought. I told my manager it would not take more than 5 minutes to do. ‘Its a one line fix’. Mistake.
There were loads of other things to do after fixing this bug. This is what I ended up doing over the next 4 hours.
- Analyze if any other code flow would explode.
- Code the fix – This only took 5 minutes as expected.