Perfect Test Coverage

by in CodeSOD on

When SC got hired, the manager said "unit testing is very important to us, and we have 100% test coverage."

Well, that didn't sound terrible, and SC was excited to see what kind of practices they used to keep them at that high coverage.


Friday On My Mind

by in Error'd on

The most common type of submission Error'd receives are simple, stupid, data problems on Amazon. The text doesn't match the image, the pricing is goofy, or some other mixup that are just bound to happen with a database of zillions of products uploaded by a plethora of barely-literate mountain village drop-shippers.

So I don't usually feature them, preferring to find something with at least a chance of being a creative new bug.


Ancestry Dot Dumb

by in CodeSOD on

Damiano's company had more work than staff, and opted to hire a subcontractor. When hiring on a subcontractor, you could look for all sorts of things. Does their portfolio contain work similar to what you're asking them to do? What's the average experience of their team? What are the agreed upon code quality standards for the contract?

You could do that, or you could hire the cheapest company.


Time to Change

by in CodeSOD on

Dennis found this little nugget in an application he inherited.

function myTime(){
    $utc_str = gmdate("M d Y H:i:s", time());
    $utc = strtotime($utc_str);
    return $utc;
}

An Overloaded Developer

by in CodeSOD on

"Oh, I see what you mean, I'll just write an overloaded function which takes the different set of parameters," said the senior dev.

That got SB's attention. You see, they were writing JavaScript, which doesn't have function overloading. "Um," SB said, "you're going to do what?"


Ripping Away the Mask

by in Representative Line on

Jason was investigating a bug in a bitmask. It should have been set to 0b11, but someone had set it to just plain decimal 11. The line responsible looked like this:

byte number = (byte) 11;

You Don't Need A Weatherman

by in Error'd on

...to know which way the wind blows. This week, it's been an ill one. Two of our readers sent us references to the BBC's reports on unusual weather in Bristol - one from the web, and one mobile. Maybe that will help you deduce the source of this error.

Frist, Graham F. shared a screenshot of the beeb's mobile app, bellowing "I know Milton is hitting the US hard right now but that's nothing compared to the 14,000 mph winds here!"


Idtoic Mistakes

by in CodeSOD on

Working at a company where the leadership started as technical people has its advantages, but it can also carry costs. Arthur is in one such environment, and while it means that management and labor have a common vocabulary, the company leadership forgets that they're not in a technical role anymore. So they still like to commit code to the project. And that's how things like this happen:

if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}
else if( this.idtoservice != null )
{
     sOwner = this.idtoservice.Common.Security.Owner;
}

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