Father's Day: fix it once, fix it for good

Happy Father's Day to all the dads, granddads, stepdads, and everyone who fills that role for someone.

One of us spent part of this week thinking about a kitchen faucet. Growing up, there was one in their house that dripped. Every few months it would start again, and every few months their dad would get out the toolbox, swap a washer, and it would stop. For a while.

Then one weekend he didn't swap the washer. He sat on the floor with the cabinet doors open and took the whole thing apart, piece by piece, laying the parts out on a towel in order. It took most of a Saturday. The cause turned out to be a worn valve seat, which chewed through every new washer within a couple of months. He replaced the seat, put it all back together, and then did something that stuck: he turned the tap on and off twenty or thirty times, checked under the sink with a flashlight, and came back the next morning to check again.

It never dripped after that.

"Fix it once" was how he put it. Not "fix it fast."

The washer approach to bugs

Software teams swap a lot of washers. A price shows 0.00 on one product, someone edits the product, the ticket closes. A broken image gets re-uploaded. A sort order looks wrong, a hotfix tweaks the query, everyone moves on.

Each of those is a real fix. But none of them answers the second question, the one that sitting on the kitchen floor answered: why did this happen, and how will we know if it happens again?

The habit we're trying to build into Testomatica is the flashlight-under-the-sink part. Once a bug is confirmed, it should turn into a test that checks the same condition every deploy. That test starts out in quarantine, proves it's stable, and then joins the gate. If the drip comes back, you hear about it before your customers do. We wrote about the quarantine part in Quarantine first.

Patience is underrated

What strikes us about the faucet story isn't the plumbing. It's that he was willing to spend a Saturday on something that "only" dripped. That it was worth understanding, not just quieting.

A lot of good testing feels like that. It's not glamorous. It's turning the tap on and off thirty times. It's coming back the next morning.

So to the dads who taught someone to check twice, take things apart carefully, and lay the pieces out in order: thank you. Some of us are still trying to work that way.