alt Hacker NewsNo tests? Just mess up some mundane detail [1] and voila! Wake-up calls and heart attacks for 100,000s of administrators?
1: "Oh, well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
Replies
Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol.
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
It’s fractions of a penny Peter.
It's just like in Superman III
I'm sorry but anyone that sees a multi million or billion dollar bill on an account that does nowhere near that should not be scared. It's obviously a mistake. Stories like this have happened with banks in my country. Check your account and you have billions in there. Guess what happened to those that withdrew money? The judge told them any reasonable person would know this is a bug. Had to give it back. Same thing here, any reasonable person doesn't get scared.
There will have been tests, but there will have been missing end-to-end tests. Test 1 will verify that the new system/product emits billing entries in some expected way ("We did 100 bytes of operations and we see we called the billing system for 100 bytes of stuff, yay, test pass"). Test 2 will be in the billing system ("We provide an incoming bill for SKU#12345 for 100 gigabyte-units and we see it costs $17, yay, test passes"). But they won't test the two things together because it will be harder to do and the teams will have different management chains. Seen it happen several times at several companies. Somebody will have said at some point "we should actually have the tests charge money" and somebody else will have said "well we can't have the tests actually charge money, that's a legal/accounting problem, it might even be a crime" and then nobody would have asked what the next best thing was.