We make a product which is used by all kinds of different companies. Some of those companies are small and just have a limited user base, while other companies are multinationals, with end-users all over the globe. Typically this means that you have many users from different time zones, all working together in the same environment.
Time zones. A dreaded word in the world of software. Even though most people take these for granted, the concept time zones can sometimes pose quite interesting challenges for us software engineers…
Works on my machine! Or does it?
One day, we received a call from a customer in Brazil, telling us that the Plan Board would crash when opened in a certain week. The Plan Board contains a planner which allows the user to assign tasks to people in an efficient way. When we got the call, initially we were a bit mystified by the bug. Our first thought was that perhaps the customer’s database got corrupted somehow, causing the crash. When we checked the data however, nothing seemed out of order.