What the app was supposed to do is take in a series of files and link them together via a lookup table. The lookup table was stored in a database, but it was slow, so I decided to cache it. Unfortunately failed lookups would create a new entry in the table.
Even more unfortunately when that happened, the cache stored a different value to what ended up being written back to the database.
What made this bug particularly insidious is that because the actual values didn't really matter, just the fact that they linked up across a batch of files, it mostly worked. Except if a batch was imported across a longer period of time, and there happened to be a server reboot in the middle (forcing the cache to be re-created from the values in the database), things would go very wrong.
This went on for years without anybody being able to make the connection, so we could never reproduce it. It wasn't catastrophic but it was incredibly annoying.
Anyway, when a the tester finally provided a full description of the circumstances she encountered the error in, I bought her a huge box of chocolates. (And fixed the bug in less than 10 minutes.)
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What the app was supposed to do is take in a series of files and link them together via a lookup table. The lookup table was stored in a database, but it was slow, so I decided to cache it. Unfortunately failed lookups would create a new entry in the table.
Even more unfortunately when that happened, the cache stored a different value to what ended up being written back to the database.
What made this bug particularly insidious is that because the actual values didn't really matter, just the fact that they linked up across a batch of files, it mostly worked. Except if a batch was imported across a longer period of time, and there happened to be a server reboot in the middle (forcing the cache to be re-created from the values in the database), things would go very wrong.
This went on for years without anybody being able to make the connection, so we could never reproduce it. It wasn't catastrophic but it was incredibly annoying.
Anyway, when a the tester finally provided a full description of the circumstances she encountered the error in, I bought her a huge box of chocolates. (And fixed the bug in less than 10 minutes.)