IniTech’s IniTest division makes a number of hardware products, like a protocol analyzer which you can plug into a network and use to monitor data in transport. As you can imagine, it involves a fair bit of software, and it involves a fair bit of hardware. Since it’s a testing and debugging tool, reliability, accuracy, and stability are the watchwords of the day.

Which is why the software development process was overseen by Russel. Russel was the “Alpha Geek”, blessed by the C-level to make sure that the software was up to snuff. This lead to some conflict- Russel had a bad habit of shoulder-surfing his fellow developers and telling them what to type- but otherwise worked very well. Foibles aside, Russel was technically competent, knew the problem domain well, and had a clean, precise, and readable coding style which all the other developers tried to imitate.

It was that last bit which got Ashleigh’s attention. Because, scattered throughout the entire C# codebase, there are exception handlers which look like this:

try
{
	// some code, doesn't matter what
	// ...
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
   ex = ex;
}

This isn’t the sort of thing which one developer did. Nearly everyone on the team had a commit like that, and when Ashleigh asked about it, she was told “It’s just a best practice. We’re following Russel’s lead. It’s for debugging.”

Ashleigh asked Russel about it, but he just grumbled and had no interest in talking about it beyond, “Just… do it if it makes sense to you, or ignore it. It’s not necessary.”

If it wasn’t necessary, why was it so common in the codebase? Why was everyone “following Russel’s lead”?

Ashleigh tracked down the original commit which started this pattern. It was made by Russel, but the exception handler had one tiny, important difference:

catch (Exception ex)
{
   ex = ex; //putting this here to set a breakpoint
}

Yes, this was just a bit of debugging code. It was never meant to be committed. Russel pushed it into the main history by accident, and the other developers saw it, and thought to themselves, “If Russel does it, it must be the right thing to do,” and started copying him.

By the time Russel noticed what was going on, it was too late. The standard had been set while he wasn’t looking, and whether it was ego or cowardice, Russel just could never get the team to follow his lead away from the pointless pattern.