For a national paper presentation contest in a reputed engineering college, they developed a website for participant registration.
Before opening the website, they changed the database table name to a better one. (You know, these developers have got a habit of naming tables and variables after their pets).
After one month of operation, they closed the registration recently.
When they checked the database for the details of the participants, they were in for a surprise. Guess what? The database was empty.
Why? They forgot to change the table name in the code.
Two things I cannot understand:
- Why did not the application throw any error?
- Why they did not test it after it went live?
What are they going to do with the paper presentation contest now? I am anxious.
Couldn’t agree more – testing is very, very important. Now if only I could follow my own advice.
WTF!!!! How can they be so stupid.. the application did not throw any error? no alerts nothing?
Shoban,
I don’t know how that happened. May be some other bug suppressed the error messages.
Until recently the company I worked for did not have an error handler for database commands, and given the tutorials I read online, I’d imagine that is pretty standard. Without this the developers rely on users to report problems such as this to them. My guess is that either the confirmation page did not check that it was submitted, and only showed a message, such as thank you; or there simply was no confirmation process (each being rather common). Either way, I can see how if the developers didn’t test and those interested in the project were interested in peeking at data before it was over, that could happen relatively easily. I will say, SQL error handling was the greatest piece of code I’ve written, saves loads of time and face.
Chris,
Thanks for sharing your experience.