It's a beautiful story. As a space fan, especially of the interplanetary type, this story was riveting to me as it unveiled details of the spacecraft testing I've never imagined. I do far less important testing in my day to day but I was able to draw some similarities with the author.
Many have posted of their failures here so I suppose I could share a couple of mine.
- Pushing gigabytes of records into a Prod table only to realize the primary key was off by a digit, rendering the data useless for a go-live. It had to be deleted by the database admins and reloaded, which took precious hours. I forget why, but an update wasn't feasible.
- A perfect storm of systems issues that lead to all servers in the pool becoming unavailable, causing an entire critical system to go dark. We got it back up within minutes, but harrowing nonetheless.
- Realizing hours before a go-live that a key data element was missing, prompting a client who was now in a code freeze to make a change (they were quite upset). Pretty sure I got an unfavorable review from that, but haven't made the same mistake since.
Many have posted of their failures here so I suppose I could share a couple of mine.
- Pushing gigabytes of records into a Prod table only to realize the primary key was off by a digit, rendering the data useless for a go-live. It had to be deleted by the database admins and reloaded, which took precious hours. I forget why, but an update wasn't feasible.
- A perfect storm of systems issues that lead to all servers in the pool becoming unavailable, causing an entire critical system to go dark. We got it back up within minutes, but harrowing nonetheless.
- Realizing hours before a go-live that a key data element was missing, prompting a client who was now in a code freeze to make a change (they were quite upset). Pretty sure I got an unfavorable review from that, but haven't made the same mistake since.