Down the Rabbit Hole: How Adding One Change to an Inactive App Led to a Whole Lot of Refactoring

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Journey Map!

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Time for the tech talk.

AppD! Tell me more!

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3 easy steps

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Let me try this out with a node app

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Hmm, this isn't 3 easy steps in node

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Try this...
[sends link]

This has to work. Jermaine knows everything!

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Already have it working in an app
Have a working hello-world app
Not working with CUPS

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Works on sample app (even with CUPS), but not my app!

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Time to give up

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Nope, you should go to prod to make sure it's not non-prod

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Let's take a small detour

Meanwhile, these tech talk "experts" thought they could get things working in 2 days for their tech talk.

Do you remember their tech talk on AppD for nodejs?

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OK, I'll go to prod...gosh darn it, now I need blue/green & multi-zone

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3 passing (25s)
  2 failing

  1) Navbar works login redirects to setNewBaseURL after correct user provided:
     Error: Waiting for element to be located By(css selector, *[id="urlSelect"])
Wait timed out after 10133ms
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2364:22
      at ManagedPromise.invokeCallback_ (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:1379:14)
      at TaskQueue.execute_ (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2913:14)
      at TaskQueue.executeNext_ (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2896:21)
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2775:27
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:639:7
  From: Task: Waiting for element to be located By(css selector, *[id="urlSelect"])
      at ControlFlow.wait (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2352:17)
      at Driver.wait (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/webdriver.js:712:29)
      at Context.<anonymous> (test-e2e/e2e.spec.js:94:16)
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/testing/index.js:144:19
      at new ManagedPromise (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:1082:7)
      at controlFlowExecute (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/testing/index.js:129:14)
      at TaskQueue.execute_ (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2913:14)
      at TaskQueue.executeNext_ (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2896:21)
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:2820:25
      at node_modules/selenium-webdriver/lib/promise.js:639:7
  From: Task: Navbar works login redirects to setNewBaseURL after correct user provided
      at Context.ret (node_modules/selenium-webdriver/testing/index.js:128:10)

Protractor failed some tests on concourse...but not every time. Then started failing locally!

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Bryan is in a bad place

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Lessons Learned

Phantomjs is awful
Documentation isn't always right
If you work on a framework/tool, make sure it's easy for developers to troubleshoot issues
Do the right thing (even if it's painful)
Don't give up