Testing Isn't Enough: Fighting Bugs with Hacks
summary
Mars Climate Orbiter burns up and a trading bug loses $440 million, so the claim is that tests alone are insufficient and runtime and dev-time hacks win. Concrete tools include a scoped find hook that forces association lookups, a global merchant consistency check that walks loaded objects and raises on mismatch, simple Nagios settlement alerts, data-consistency checks that abort corrupt saves, and safe migrations that blow up locally unless concurrent indexes are used — these hacks run in production and in practice catch issues missed by tests.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 0:51Mars Climate Orbiter
- 1:25World of Warcraft Plague
- 3:28Testing is not enough
- 8:59Strategy
- 12:34Allow bypassing
- 13:28What about code like this?
- 17:22Check data consistency
- 20:14Nagios check
- 21:06Hacks for development
- 25:26Summary
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