I got assigned to work a curious bug in the system. The customer said a bunch of data was in the wrong state. I called our customer and got some more info. The best help they gave me was some examples in production.I studied the audits and found the bad state transition. Then I poured over our database packages to find out why this was happening. Then I found the guilty party.
Somebody was making a call to some existing procedures in our packages. They found out they needed to set some data to an intermediate value first for the code to work. However when the code encountered an error, the package code left the data in the bad intermediate state.
Fail. I took out the hack. then I modified the packages to work with the new data pattern. Couldn't the original programmer have done this? Do the hard work up front. It will save everybody some pain. Next I started looking into why there was an error in the first place. That's a story for another time.
