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That brought it home for me. Our IT department (a total of three people, one of whom never touches these projects) created a bug in their software and only caught it on the "trial" rollout. That caution might have saved nearly a dozen man-hours of workers waiting for them to revert the changes.
If we can get that right in a small company that barely touches software, how could a multibillion-dollar corporation that focused on security fail?
This is exactly my thought. I've been pushing for two additional tiers of production roll-outs for our software: Dark Releases and Smoke Releases. They've paid dividends for (relatively speaking) trivial solutions multiple times over. It's just such an obvious step to take.
Having enough discipline on your unit testing team to make things meaningful (I.E. not just Regex wildcard matching) seems so, so obvious too. But if you used the former approach you'd start seeing you have to fix that root cause many moons ago.
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Yeah, there's situations where a bug gets past your development or test environment, and there's times where you're legitimately in too much of a hurry to test, but this is...
Like, the best spin I can give on this is that whatever safeties they did have were apparently enough to keep this from already happening earlier, when it didn't cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and probably a couple lives on the margins? But as much as the ratsphere jokes about the ideal rates of errors never being zero, the ideal rate of this error is so much lower than this that it's hard to compare.
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