Odd ball story

[LoudNoise]

We have a product that wasn't expected to sale well and didn't. This was fine since the original customer paid 90% of the development costs so the other five customers were mostly profit. All the customers have their own IT departments so support in both minimal and quick when necessary.

One of the customers wanted an add-on which we did. We had to modify the installation script, which I wrote, so I assigned it to one of newer guys just to give him some experience with our installation scripting software. It is a fairly complicated script but I figured that adding to it wouldn't be that difficult. He worked on it for a couple of hours and, after a number of questions, couldn't get it work. I took it back over just to get it done and ended up spending a couple of hours on it before it was completed. It turns out that I had introduced a bug in the script when I wrote it that simply hadn't been hit before now.

It was a classic stupid move. This is an old script and we had run into a problem when installing the program on a Win 2000 machine. Instead of solving the problem, I merely worked around it with an If/then statement and didn't bother to document why I did it. This worked well until we added the installation steps for the new add-on. The script ran the if/then, saw it wasn't true and proceeded to do what it was told to do which, in this case, was not to install the new add-on.

[malliz]

We had "comment your code properly" driven into us at every class but it appears to be a yesterday thing if the Mozilla codebase is any indication.