A Glimpse of a Miracle

This time, I thought I will share one of my old project experience with you [the anonymous readers of my blog]. This is a mail which I dusted out from my outlook inbox's sent items. 

For a developer, the moment of happiness is when the developed product matures to its completeness. This is a special kind of experience you will understand if you have a high passion and enthusiasm of developing virtual applications using your virtual tool kit. 

This is classified information. Hence I have censored a few parts of the mail. This mail was written to my close friends last year to share my experience after our final product release. 

A Glimpse of a Miracle

 

"Two weeks scratching the head, not because of dandruff.

 

It all started on xx-xx-2008 when the customer reported a bug. Our tool is not installing on Windows XP Service Pack 3. Today, xx-xx-2008 its our product release which is a milestone release which happens every 6 months. This tool goes to the external customers. And this bug was reported by one of our major customers.

 

What happens when all the work for last 6 months is wasted just because the tool is not getting installed in a specific OS. Windows XP SP3 is recently released by Microsoft. And our initial impression was that Windows XP SP3 had some issues.

 

Ok, now back to business. We need to fix the bug. We opened the installer tool which is supposed to install our tool. The only person who has worked on the installer tool is unavailable. This tool was an unknown territory for us.

 

First one week was spend with the routine checks - trials to reproduce the defect, mail chains with customers to get screen shots of the issue and more details. The defect occurred for the customer in Windwos XP SP3 which was installed in a virtualization software called vmware which helps us to install multiple OS in the same machine.

 

All the tools, Wise Installer - the installer tool, VMWare - the virtualization tool - all were new to us. Last Friday, ie five days after the defect was reported, we were able to reproduce the defect. We thought we could fix it in a day. Friday we could not fix it. Saturday to office, could not fix, then Monday, Tuesday. Agony started. Whether the product release will get postponed because of this defect at the last moment.

 

We tried different solutions. Took almost 50 to 60 builds (internal releases) in last 2 weeks. Yesterday night. 10 PM. Next day is the release. :(.

 

We created the last build with the last solution in our hands. Our hopes were dried out. I started yesterday with drained out energy. Days and days without any sight of a result.

 

And ….

 

Wow! That worked! We were all shocked with happiness for a moment. The hands of God for a believer. The fruit of hardwork for an athiest. A glimpse of a miracle for us.

 

The last minute tension, deadlines, issues …. Everything leads to this final moment. The taste of success. And we live for this."