Question

We’ve all had them, errors or bugs that have lost us lots of time. I’ve seen it time and time again, the first 90% of the coding work for a given project takes 10% of the total time. It’s that last 90% of the time you spend looking for that rogue bug that’s really only about 10% of the coding work. That one thing that just doesn’t want to work. Sometimes it’s something big and other it’s just that one character that was off.

What is the bug or error that has cost you and/or your team the most amount of time?

Answer 1

Once upon a time, I worked on a database project for an apartment management company. We had tables like Customer, CustomerStatus, Apartment, ApartmentStatus, and so forth. Queries I wrote would look like:

SELECT cu.Name, ap.ApartmentUnit, as.DateOccupied
 from Customer cu
  inner join CustomerStatus cs
   on cs.CustomerId = cu.CustomerId
  inner join ApartmentStatus as
   on as.ResidentId = cu.CustomerId
    and as.Status = 5
  inner join Apartment ap
   on ap.ApartmentId = as.ApartmentId
 where cu.CustomerId = @CustomerId

This query and ones like it simply would not run, no matter how hard I tried, modified, or stared at it. It took days before I realised that my entirely reasonable table alias of “as” was a reserved word…