Well I went to work today to figure out a problem. Just what I like. I arrived very early, but I spent hours and hours trying to figure out what went wrong. I started in trying to understand the scope of the problem by varying the program through recoding the software in different ways. For each variation I would write down what I did, what I expected and what actually happened – a kind of a simplified scientific method. However, each thing I tried did not change the problem much, thus, providing little information. I got more and more frustrated. Nothing I did was helping.
Finally I left for lunch when Katie and Matthew arrived home from their long drive back from North Carolina [straight through for 18+ hours]. It was nice to see them, listening about their vacation, and I’m glad that they’re back safe and sound.
After lunch I returned to work and worked past dinner. Still nothing helped, and I was running out of ideas and getting really frustrated. Finally I called Candice, one of my co-workers, for ideas and got a few good ones. I tried one and it didn’t help. But the next one was to go back several versions (what we call a build) and see if it fails. When I tried the first one it worked successfully, so now I know more – from that version to the latest something has gone wrong.
But I had to leave because I needed my TV fix, that is, Big Brother. Now I’ve got something to do tomorrow – try each version one by one and find out when it begins to fail. So tomorrow is another weekend day at work, oh well I’m not as frustrated as I was before.