I had a scary seeming bug this afternoon that I had to share. Our tester showed me a problem with a web application not showing a valid option in a dropdown box on a staging environment server. After totally dismissing my "we haven't changed that code in six months" line, 3-4 of us went to work to chase down the problem before we had to cancel an uncomfortably visible production rollout.
First, check all the database data. Everything checks out just fine. The FitNesse regression tests are still humming along, so it's doubtful to me that the sql is the problem.
We looked at a user specific configuration file and all of the necessary options were indeed there.
I moved on to troubleshooting the remoting configuration. We have a specific environment test for the remoting configuration, but maybe somebody ignored a reported failure or it didn't work. Nope, the remoting was fine.
I threw my hands up in disgust and went back to something else. Our tester piped up in about 10 minutes with the underlying cause. The system was looking for the user configuration file with the filename [User Number].xml. The folder view we were using on the staging server was hiding the file extensions. The real name of the file on the file system was [User Number].xml.xml. Doh.
My faith in reality and reason restored, production push on track, and there goes a good chunk out of an otherwise productive day:(