Finally!

I've been meaning to start a blog for ages. Now that Janet and I have finished our draft manuscript, it feels like there might be time for a post here or there. Thanks to Dawn Cannan for inspiring me with her great new blog.

So how about something interesting to start out with. Today there was a thread on the agile-testing Yahoo group about defect tracking systems (DTS), and someone asked for an example of when you got information from a DTS that was useful. Today our test system got an error that seemed mighty familiar, but I couldn't remember the cause from when it happened before. I was able to find it easily in the DTS, it was a missing trigger. Periodically we replace one of our test schemas with a fresh copy of production, and in the process, triggers get disabled or lost (not sure why). If I couldn't have found this in the DTS, it would have taken longer to track down the problem.

Someone replied to this post wondering why I didn't have a test to detect the problem. The regression suite that runs in our build uses a different schema, that has canonical data. However, I could easily have run a regression suite against the new copy of production and found the problem. I'll do that from now on, but how to remember to do it? Manual steps are easily forgotten...