Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
A Version Control Story
John and Mary work for an interactive advertising agency and they
have been working on a microsite for one of their biggest clients.
Things have gone smoothly throughout the life of the project and
they are almost ready to send it to quality control when John
noticesaproblemduringoneofhisownqualitytests.Heisolates
the issue, notes the steps taken to recreate the problem, and opens
the.flafilethathebelievesactually contains the error. After navi-
gating to the line of code he suspects as the bad line, he makes his
change and publishes the .swf file. Because it
stheendoftheday
and John has a flight to catch for an out-of-town vacation, he saves
his work, shuts down his computer, and leaves.
The next morning, Mary passes the project over to quality con-
trol as soon as she gets to work. Within an hour, she starts receiv-
ing numerous notifications of bugs in the site; bugs in areas she
thought she had tested the day before. Mary opens the site in her
Web browser and starts to navigate to the sections that contain the
reported issues, and sure enough, there are a lot of areas that have
mysteriously decided to break. Because the final deadline for this
project is fast approaching, Mary feverishly opens the source .fla
files and starts to search for the cause of each bug. As she digs
through the code in each file, she comes across a couple of possi-
ble culprits and makes changes to those lines. After making each
change,Maryteststhefileandfindsthattheerrorsstillexist.She
goes back to the code and, without undoing her previous changes,
she tries other options that only end up creating more bugs in
areas she isn
'
t currently testing. By the end of the day not only has
Mary not been able to solve the original problem, but more have
surfaced in her attempts. It has gotten late and Mary is tired and
frustrated so she decides to call it a night and try again tomorrow.
The next morning Mary feels rested and refreshed. As she opens
the files to take another run at fixing the bugs, she realizes there is
one more thing she didn
'
t think of before. She finds her way to the
line of code she presumes is causing a problem and discovers that her
new suspicion is correct. She makes the change, publishes the .swf
files and tests for the problem, which is now corrected. However,
sinceMarymadesomanychangestothecodeyesterdaythatshe
failed to remove, the site is now broken in many other areas and she
has to try to remember where each modification is in the site. After
hours of work, Mary finally resolves all of the issues that were reported
to her by quality control and the site is ready to go live
'
…
a day late.
What Happened?
When John made his change before leaving town, he misspelled
the name of a variable that was extremely important to the rest of
