The Anatomy of a Bug

I just finished reading a blog entry by a Microsoft tester on the anatomy of a bug. Its really interesting to hear how a really small and silly bug can balloon into a testing nightmare.

As I was reading it I was saying to myself: "Developer did a naughty think and trusted a foreign key location that he doesn't control. Easy fix, recreate the key each time the key could be used, and fail cleanly if perms do not permit that."

Well, that ended up being the fix, but I never fathemed the amount of testing around the fix that would be needed. Especially when it has to be translated into 20 languages. Man i8n is a pain.

Well worth the read, even only to glimpse at the testing required to fix a bug at Microsoft.