Different methodologies for solving bugs that only occur in production

Question

As one who is relatively new to the whole support and bug fixing environment and a young programmer I had never come across a bug that only occurs in the Websphere environment but not on the localhost test enviroment, until today. When I first got this bug report I was confused as to why I couldn't reproduce it on the localhost test environment. I decided to try on the Websphere test environment to see what would happen and I successfully reproduced the bug. The problem is I can't make changes and build to the Websphere test enviroment. I can only make changes to my local environment. Given this handicap what methodologies exist for resolving these kinds of bugs. Or are there even any methodologies at all? Any advice or help on how to approach issues like this?

Answer 1

• Campaign for full access to a test environment. Being able to tweak things, redeploy and retry makes a huge difference. It's entirely reasonable to explain how not having access severely restricts your ability to do your job.
• Make sure you've got sufficient logging, and make it configurable. Make sure you keep the logs for long enough to track down a problem reported by a customer even if it happened a few days ago.
• When you finally diagnose a problem and why it only happens in a particular environment, document it and try to persuade your local system to behave the same way - that should make it easier to diagnose another symptom of the same problem next time.