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0 pointsyardstick2y ago0 comments

How do you detect errors like this?

What is an error? Is a business logic bug going to be picked up by this process automatically, or is some manual steps involved?

Ie a point of sale app releases an update that automatically halves the amount to charge, but displays the full amount to the merchant in the UI. Unit tests pass (because an engineer made a human mistake). Backend calls are correctly used, no errors thrown, simply the wrong amount is used.

How would this be automatically detected and reverted?

Would anyone writing point of sale software want to risk this over one of the biggest trading periods of the year?

0 comments

bertil2y ago

As you point out, it really depends on what is an error. Most of the companies I know of have a Holiday freeze are video games, casual ones, even. Changes are minor fixes and optimization—glitches that a player likely won’t notice, but you want to detect them early to avoid losing your ability to detect more.

Back-end tools are different, and I definitely see reasons other than bugs to not change business logic this month.

codebolt2y ago

Yeah, that model may work for many public facing apps, but probably less so for enterprise systems that are heavy in business logic.

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