Lesson 3: Defeating Bugs: The Council of Elrond's Edicts

[CFL2M] How to minimize bugs in an environment

*Note: You're reading a lesson from our ColdFusion Legacy 2 Modernization E-Course [CFL2M]. Interested in getting the full course? Click here to sign up.

If you don’t already have consistent development, test, and production environments, you’ll always be fighting an uphill battle with bugs.

You're bound to make small mistakes when you try to do it manually. When you use software, it eliminates the possibility of human errors.

Having unseen bugs is like navigating the Mines of Moria in the dark. One step can lead to a disaster. 

If you already have this automated, then great! You get a gold star and a pat on the back 🙂

(Another pat on the back if you did last email’s Aragorn Action Step and downloaded a performance monitoring tool.)

If your production environments aren’t automated, then making "a quick edit on production" can be as dangerous as inviting a company of Goblins to edit your CF code...

And if the dev, test and prod servers are not synced to have the same CF version and config, etc, then weird differences may occur when users test your apps. This results in bugs that are a BIG pain to fix. 

The preventive solution: establish a robust environment management strategy.

This ensures that your development, testing, and production environments are identical. 

Aragorn Action Step: Download Docker if you do not already have it. Play with creating containers for dev and QA environments. 

Don’t do this manually, you must automate it.

If you’re doing this manually, hit “reply” and let me know if that is working for you or not. I’m pretty confident I can show you a better way.

In the next lesson, I will show you exactly how to use Docker with CF to solve this problem. 

Cheers to fewer bugs!

Michaela Light, CEO TeraTech

PS Are you interested in a free assessment of your legacy CF app? You’ll get an expert opinion on what’s working well, what the big modernization and maintenance issues are, and a brief list of solutions. Complete this short form if you’re interested.