Questions tagged [failure]
25 questions
351
votes
20 answers
How should I behave as a developer in a project that's headed for failure?
I am a developer in a 5-member team and I believe our project is headed for disaster. I'll describe why in a moment, but my question is: how should I behave?
The deadline is in 1.5 months, and I feel no matter what we do, this project will fail.…
Louis Rhys
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30
votes
11 answers
Failed Project: When to call it?
A few months ago my company found itself with its hands around a white-hot emergency of a project, and my entire team of six pulled basically a five week "crunch week". In the 48 hours before go-live, I worked 41 of them, two back to back…
Dan Ray
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22
votes
5 answers
Are there any notable examples of business disasters directly attrutible to open-source software?
In "enterprise" environments, I've observed a strong prejudice towards proprietary software. Even in large business that use Java, it is unusual to find MySQL or PostgreSQL, and WebSphere and WebLogic are strongly preferred over JBoss or…
Eric Wilson
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21
votes
9 answers
What have you seen go wrong when introducing SCRUM?
What was the single point of failure encountered when your company decided to replace the current processes with SCRUM?
Can you give me some examples of things that have gone really wrong when a company tried to introduce SCRUM? I'd like to hear…
cringe
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15
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2 answers
What's the difference between robustness and fault-tolerance?
Systems / programs / distributed algorithms / ... are often described with the predicate robust or fault-tolerant.
What is the difference?
Details:
When I google for +robust +"fault-tolerant", I only get two hits, both unhelpful.
When I…
DaveFar
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12
votes
4 answers
How to deal with programming projects that fail?
It's not uncommon for projects to fail.
As a programmer, how do you deal with projects that fail?
Some definitions of failure:
Misses deadline.
Code and functionality does not do what it's supposed to.
Software becomes vapor-ware or endless number…
spong
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12
votes
5 answers
Should a single failure fail a bulk operation?
In the API I'm working on there's a bulk delete operation which accepts an array of IDs:
["1000", ..., "2000"]
I was free to implement the delete operation as I saw fit, so I decided to make the whole thing transactional: that is, if a single ID is…
rath
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11
votes
8 answers
What lessons did you learn from a project which nearly/actually failed due to bad multithreading?
What lessons did you learn from a project which nearly/actually failed due to bad multithreading?
Sometimes, the framework imposes a certain threading model that makes things an order of magnitude more difficult to get right.
As for me, I have yet…
rwong
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11
votes
7 answers
Looking for jobs after a project ending badly
My company just canceled the project I was working on because they were dissatisfied with how it was going. I was quite disappointed with it because I thought the project was going well and I had already explained the limitations that the software…
user13332
8
votes
10 answers
What would you do? Long overdue on basically everything and now customer won't talk to you
I took over a rather complicated project as the sole developer/project manager and tester sometime last year.
In November last year there was a deadline for some new functionality to be delivered.
The system I took over which was supposedly ready to…
user17971
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5
votes
3 answers
Forgetting to merge changes from trunk to branch
Recently, I forgot to merge changes from trunk to our maintenance branch. This caused us to rebuild - twice - and put QA on hold for two days while we fixed the mess.
Normally, when committing to both branches, I commit a single changeset to trunk,…
mskfisher
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5
votes
2 answers
Handle failures in Event Driven Architecture
Suppose you have a bounded context with ~30 business events and, for simplicity sake, the same number of commands like ChangeUserEmailCommand -> UserEmailChangedEvent initiated from a web UI. Processing a command may fail for the following main…
UserControl
- 159
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5
votes
2 answers
Load Balancer / API Gateway availability or is it a single point of failure?
I'm developing a microservice system. I have a discovery service (Eureka) for all my services and an API Gateway (Zuul) to call each service via an URL.
My problem: How can I assure that a service call via my API Gateway is high available?
If the…
Milgo
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5
votes
4 answers
What to do when allowing application to run in an invalid state?
We currently have a 'global catch all exceptions' section in our application. When an uncaught exception is thrown, the stack trace is displayed and the application continues running.
More often than not, this leaves the state of the application…
Sheldon Warkentin
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3
votes
2 answers
How to avoid points of critical failure?
Background
We have a ton of GPS devices in vehicles. These devices need to communicate with our system. To achieve this, we need to parse the device's messages before proceeding.
The following describes my scalable and fail resistant architecture…
Flame_Phoenix
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