dinogalactic

Smart things to say when a production bug arises in software development

Today I noticed an issue that was affecting production. Doesn't matter the issue, I don't think, but my supervisor asked some good questions, so I figured I'd document them. This helps me remember what I should do to be a better leader in emergent situations.

These aren't direct quotes, just summaries of the things he wanted to figure out to help him prioritize.

  1. Does this relate to some previous or ongoing issue that we know about?
  2. If so, what do I need to know about it that others on the team already know?
  3. How does this affect users?
  4. Do we know how many users are affected, or can we find out?
  5. If no one has reproduced the issue, could someone make a ticket and spend some short amount of time trying to reproduce it (up to 90 minutes)?
  6. If we can reproduce it, are there estimates of difficulty on a fix?
  7. If we were going to deploy it, would anything special be required in that deploy?