Okay, what was that I said last week about my tech debt story being a “learning opportunity”? Something to that effect? The good news: the story was completed by our former coworker, and the only reason that it never went to production was that no one had the capacity to test it, as it requires extensive regression testing. The bad news? The story was completed MONTHS ago, and some of the code has changed since then. I created a branch off our December branch, followed all my notes in applying the patch…and came up with “conflicts” in one of the jobs I was trying to update. After peering at the code, comparing, and figuring out which code was new since the story completion in July, I managed to narrow it down to a few lines that needed to be added to the “completed” story. I tried again…and again (I hit the wrong button and ended up reverting things back, so had to try again).
Fun fact! In Guidewire, if you try to reapply a patch, it doesn’t overlay. It REPEATS! Imagine my surprise when I then tried to fire up the GUnit test for the job the story is meant to fix, and got big honking compiling errors. The error came up as some mumbo-jumbo I couldn’t quite understand, until I looked at error line numbers and realized the code was some of the new code, and it was the SAME code, three times over. I checked everything else and every line of code added to the jobs was repeating three times.
After resetting everything and trying again, I finally managed to apply the patch and the newer code correctly. Before you ask, I did create a new patch with all the story updates and post-July updates. Everything appears to check out, but I still have to run ALL the GUnit tests to test everything, with and without the changes. Luckily, I’ve had some practice at this…
