Data Migration Bug Fix Wasted Two Days on a Mechanism That Could Never Work
A software team migrating short-term leave data discovered that nine of thirteen corrections their migration code had written in production were incorrect. The system used a 'heal' step designed to cancel duplicate legacy records when a new data feed re-reported the same entries, but the two feeds shared no common identifier, forcing matches on value shape alone. Three bugs related to a new HR platform field, timezone handling, and case sensitivity were identified and fixed, briefly appearing to resolve the discrepancies. However, a fourth bug revealed the core heal logic was fundamentally flawed, as its matching condition could fire incorrectly when multiple rows shared the same employee, date, and leave-type values. Two full days of engineering work were spent debugging a correction mechanism that, by design, could never have functioned reliably in all real-world scenarios.
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