Know more?
Know more?

September 3, 2024
Successfully dealing with setbacks

In the world of software, not everything always goes as planned. We recently had a major update that didn't go as smoothly as we had hoped. But what could have been a big problem ended up being a learning experience!

An inspiring quote on a window: If you never know failure, you will never know success - Sugar Ray Leonard

The release with unexpected bugs

We were working hard on a major update and thought everything was ready. We had tested it thoroughly and were confident. But when the update went live, problems came to light. The bugs were difficult to reproduce and did not show up in our automated tests. It wasn't until later, when our customers were reviewing the release, that we discovered the issues. It seemed like a disaster at the time!

Converting challenges into a learning moment

Unfortunately, after we fixed the initial bugs and released an update, we found even more problems. These were already there, but had not been noticed before. Only because of the more extensive manual testing, we found these hidden issues.

It's not ideal to find bugs after a release. It can be very annoying for our users. In the worst case, data could even be lost. But even though we never want to do this again, this situation allowed us to test our backup and recovery procedures. Thanks to these procedures, our customers did not lose any data, and the impact was ultimately minimal.

The importance of proper procedures

What we learned from this is how critical good procedures are. Even if unexpected bugs pop up, we can fix them quickly. This means that our customers remain protected against major problems. We were able to roll back the update and resolve the issues without disrupting our service.

This experience showed us where we could improve our testing. Automated testing is useful, but some cases are not always covered. Manual testing is time-consuming, but essential. We've adjusted our testing process and will use these lessons in future updates.

Conclusion

In software development, not everything always goes perfectly. How we deal with these challenges is what counts. We learned a lot from this experience and turned a potential crisis into a minor temporary inconvenience. Most importantly, our customers can trust that their data is safe with us. We remain committed to providing the best service, even if everything doesn't go according to plan!