Saturday, June 29, 2013

Kids and Reproducing Errors



After spending over a day setting up more virtual servers in my virtual domain, installing SQL Server, installing Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and installing ACS Services, all on my laptop, I exclaimed out loud, that I had successfully reproduced the customer’s issue.
My older son heard and was confused by this. He asked me why I would ever want to “re-create a problem”. I then explained to him that if you can set up your own system that has the same problem as your customer’s system, you are %90 closer to fixing the customer’s problem. Not only does this give you tremendous insight as to what is causing the problem so that you can track it down and fix it, it gives you a test bed so that you can verify that your fix works.
Of course, that opened the door to my wife’s story about way back when she did a short stint as a support engineer and fixed a bug on the IBM System/36 Operating System where she added an “else” to an “if” statement. It is about the hundredth time that I heard it, but the kids didn’t remember hearing it before and got a kick out of it. Gotta love her. ;)

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