22-Nov-2006 - The importance of versioning

I thought we would only have a mistake with versions once but I was wrong...

Background:

In my company, such as in many others, we have a database, actually it’s more an application with a database, where we store our bugs and changes (new features, minor improvements, change requests). Normally when a bug/chance, that we generally call issue, is inserted in the database it comes with a “detected on version” field and when is passed to QA team for testing comes with a “target release” label. The problem is that sometimes issues are solved for one target release but after QA tests it’s reopened and work has to be done.

I had an issue to test that was retested on several versions, and target release never changed, staying 1.0.1 forever. After being corrected and closed, last year, the target release wasn’t updated but it was approved for V1.2 (for example).

One year later I received the issue once again, because a problem was detected. The target release, once again wasn’t updated and the latest documents shown the hotfix was available for V2.0, so the team tested on that version.

Later on, when delivering it to the seller we were informed that TR should be V1.2.3 instead of V2.0, so a day of work was wasted.

I checked out if the work was done to the proper version 1.2.3 but it wasn’t. The Development Manager worked out the hotfix for the wrong version and passed it to QA to test with the wrong version. So once again the client will receive the work late and retest will be done because of an experienced manager mistake, once again!

The last time something like this happened the consequences were bigger and I thought it would teach him a lesson. A client had several requests and it’s version wasn’t the last one. All the programming was done for the last version (he didn’t bothered to ask for which version it had to be done), the files were sent to the client and only too late the mistake was discovered once again by QA, once again with the retesting needed to be done.

Lesson learnt? Always update the version for which it must be developed and tested!