When you implement a new feature somewhere, when you change just some bits of the code, when you fix a bug, when you just change a common text in an app.. What do you do afterwards? Do you really check the result or do you trust yourself that it works 100%. It is an interesting thing to talk about…

I have to be honest and admit that I trusted myself a lot of times in the early days and at least 2 of 10 times I was wrong. If you deal with customers then its two times too much Especially when you have that guy on the phone and you claim that you did change it but he is browsing the application and does not see any change. In that case you’re really pissed (sorry for that word) because you haven’t spent one minute to check the result/consequence of your change.

So thats why I always suggest to check !everything! that has been changed. You never know what you forget but when you get sure that you see the change yourself then you’re on the safe side. Here is a list what you could not have thought about:

• you have been working in the wrong file. The file you have been working on was just a backup, in the wrong location, wrong server, etc. Such things happen everyday.
• you forgot to refresh/restart some service, application, etc.
• forgot to publish the file. This is common but i am sure it happens as well. For instance you forgot to upload the file on the server if its a web app.
• forgot to compile. for all out there who need to do this.
• last but not least programing failures which you haven’t thought about (especially when you are changing code of others you should 100% check the effect of the change even if it’s just a typo):
  • you changed the wrong part of the code. happens normally when there are duplicate pieces of the code. which in turn happens because of bad programming style.
  • you changed something on the presentation layer but somehow it affects other layer(s) as well. Horribly design! Anyway but it happens, especially if you’re changin foreign code

  Hence its highly recommended to check every change. You save yourself and others a lot of troubles and iterations of changing and testing. Personally I think that this is a quality characteristic of a programmer and that it’s not a tall order to expect a check of the change. In most cases it’s less than a minute. Don’t get lazy …. For sure everybody does but be aware of all the points I mentioned above.

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  This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Testing, general stuff, programming style. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.