* * * * *
                                        
        I never said testing was bad, just that it's tedious to automate
                                        
I might come across as someone who hates testing, if the past two [1] months
[2] have been anything to go by, but I've really been complaining about
automating the tests, including some rather difficult ones to automate [3].
But honesty compels me state this: the new regression test [4] has found
another potential bug.

Because I added code to delay (or entirely block) responses from the various
database sources, a few test cases were added to a problematic feature to
ensure it's been fixed. The Happy Path™ has been fixed, but there is a Sad
Path™ that's been missed. We query two sources, A and B. In the scenario we
are testing, the data we want is from B—any data from A is ignored (but we
have to query anyway due to “reasons”). So the case of A has no data, B has
data is fine. But it's when A doesn't return (or times out), the reponse from
B is ignored when it probably shouldn't be (since that data does get back to
us). And it would not surprise me if there aren't more cases like this.

Normally, I wouldn't expect this to happen all that much [It doesn't. We have
a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for that, and I don't think it's worth
worring about–the largest spike  I've seen over the past month is easly three
orders of magnitude lower than our volume; the rest barely show up on the
graph. —Sean], and the re-engineering required to handle these casees might
be significant since it would require adding more states to the processing
state machine. But that's not my call to make.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2021/06
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2021/07
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2021/06/09.1
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2021/07/29.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

.