The thrilling saga of a database gone bad
True Tails
In which our hero relates a "True Tail" where lack of testing almost created a divorce.
Recently, I wrote that programmers typically make some of the worst testers of their own software, based on the logic that if programmers knew enough about the bugs, they would write the program correctly in the first place. Of course, this is a generalization and led to lots of discussion about unit tests, regression tests, and many other types of tests used to validate code.
On the other hand, many people agreed with me, based on experience of sending the code out to end users and hearing a programmer scream, "I never thought someone would use my code that way." To illustrate this last point, I will relate one of maddog's True Tails(TM).
The year was 1975, and I was working for a very large insurance company. We had 500,000 12-inch, nine-track tapes in our on-site tape library, numbered from 000001 to 500xxx, and each of those tapes had an external, human-readable number with the same internal machine-readable number on the tape.
[...]
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