Nasty, Flaky, No-good, Unit Testing Problems in Spring Boot
Inevitably, I will stumble upon something in my development journey that completely stumps me. It’s almost always something stupid. Here I studied so hard to learn Markov Chains, fancy design patterns, tree traversal algorithms and unsupervised machine learning, only to be thwarted by an errant configuration setting or dependency mismatch.
Unfortunately, these days even ChatGPT can fail us. In fact, I have already experienced multiple times where AI was the cause, not the solution to the problems I encountered. Here I updated my favourite web framework to access a new feature and then ChatGPT autocompletes a nice configuration method for my security, I absent-mindedly hit <TAB> because it all looks like it should work. Then, I go on to build my feature and something unexpected happens. Something like:
MYSQL ERROR: UNKNOWN COLUMN 'WHATNOT' IN FIELD LIST
What the heck? I completely removed the redundant ‘WHATNOT’ field from my WHOSOWITZ entity ages ago! My IDE has checked all my errors and everything compiles okay. I’ve revisited the documentation and everything follows exactly as I expected. Also, I tested this environment successfully in the past. What the heck happened?
In short, this is not just a bug. It’s more like a bedbug or a mouse that’s faster than speedy…
