We talked about doing this for the Zune’s lock-up a month ago, but Internet time flies faster than we could think. So here’s another opportunity to start our soon-to-be favorite series: Told You So. Which is a short for – “It would be less painful if unit testing was involved”.
1st entry in the series goes to Google. Last weekend they labeled the Internet as malware. It’s not that they’re so off the mark (I take full responsibility for my posts), but there are some sites that are not so harmful. Marissa Mayer posted on the official Google blog that it was a “human error”:
Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.
I don’t know the real code they used, but the only human error I see here is not having a unit test for that. Kudos to Google for fixing this quickly, but think of the bad publicity they could have avoided.
Unit testing. Told you so.
