Troubleshooting Environments

What are environmental issues?

Most software products, especially enterprise software products, come with best practice guidelines and release notes that specify or describe the environment into which the software must be deployed. Mostly, these best practices and installations describe the environments the code is designed to handle. Any deployments that don’t conform to the guidelines prescribed are typically not supported. Therefore, the software won’t handle the inputs and conditions that are caused because of this nonconformity.

However, before one points the finger at the customer’s deployment, it must be determined with absolute certainty that the input or condition that is the cause of the bug at hand is because of an unsupported deployment or configuration. Absolving one’s product of any wrongdoing and pointing to the customer’s environment is something that must be done with utmost prudence and substance. Any misstep here can adversely affect the company and product’s reputation and strain the relationship with the customer. Moreover, even if the issue is with the customer’s setup, the blame is on the support and the dev teams to identify the issue with the environment.