Working at Easyname, I heard from our support department that strange things were happening with PayPal payments – either they seemed not to be appearing on our site, or there were errors in the logfiles, and the users were complaining.

This is obviously a “drop everything” kind of bug – no matter the fact I was deep in the middle of doing some other software development (or even if I’d been working at another customer), if stuff to do with money doesn’t work, everything else must be stopped and that must be looked at with the highest priority.

What I did:

• Look at the logfiles, there was an “unknown error” there (not very helpful!)
• Set up a developer account for Paypal, get our software on my dev system to work with it
• Test the PayPal IDN protocol using their tools and my newly set-up development environment
• Change the software to produce more logging (rather than “unknown error” – although to my knowledge, that log had never been printed before, in the year or so the system was online)
• Release the version with more debugging online
• Communicate with various people I’m working with (management, support, ops, ..)
• Test the new version by making a payment
• See that it still didn’t work

What I should have done:

• Do a search using twitter.

What can I say? Looking at logfiles is such a legacy approach to bug solving.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.