Release It!, 2nd Edition

An Ounce of Prevention?

When such staggering costs result from such a small error, the natural response is to say, “This must never happen again.” (I’ve seen ops managers pound their shoes on a table like Nikita Khrushchev while declaring, “This must never happen again.”) But how can it be prevented? Would a code review have caught this bug? Only if one of the reviewers knew the internals of Oracle’s JDBC driver or the review team spent hours on each method. Would more testing have prevented this bug? Perhaps. Once the problem was identified, the team performed a test in the stress test environment that did demonstrate the same error. The regular test profile didn’t exercise this method enough to show the bug. In other words, once you know where ...