[GNC] Found a bug, accounts gone haywire.

[Michael or Penny Novack]

Also, speaking from the experience of decades in the cypher mines....

If you have something weird going on that affects just YOU (other users 
are not having this problem) it is almost certainly not a bug.

That doesn't mean that it is impossible to be a bug (*) but the problem 
is hundreds of times more likely to be something like corrupted data, etc.


Michael D Novack

* -- it is precisely things like this situation, the programmers are 
stumped, nobody else has the problem, but other things like corrupted 
data have been ruled out, that it would be brought to me. There ARE rare 
bugs that do not manifest except under very precise circumstances. My 
favorite was one that had survived undetected in production for twenty 
years of nightly runs before the exact conditions for it to manifest 
aligned. Our shop had an "award" (a shame award) that went from 
programmer to programmer residing with the last to have caused a 
production crash. Moved about every week or two. We had great a great 
fun parading this to the programmer who made the error >20 years before 
(and who was now the corporate VP responsible for all data processing)

  A bug like this that does not manifest even with 20 years of 
production data thrown at it is NOT going to be caught by testing. You 
just have to have have habits that make you safe from coding the error 
in the first place (and when she made the mistake, was a relatively new 
to the floor  programmer)