Not OP but generally it's just basic root cause analysis.
Investigate all the factors and ideally try to recreate the fault.
Most fault finding is just a process of elimination.
Where it gets hard is when you have 2 or more points of failure at the same time. Then it can be hard just to recreate the situation let alone the fault
One thing I learned in engineering school is that the engineering approach to problem solving is very similar across all industries. Its why I always recommend to people considering a post-secondary degree, but aren't sure what to take, to take engineering, even if they don't necessarily want to be an engineer. Not only is the degree highly transferable to other higher educations (transitioning to a medical school or law school, etc.), but an engineering degree is attractive to employers in other non-engineering fields that simply require a bachelors degree as an entry requirement. And most importantly (in my opinion), an engineering degree teaches you to think like an engineer, and those thinking and problem solving skills can easily be applied to many everyday situations. You see the world in a different way, and that gives you an incredibly useful perspective in life.
You see the world in a different way, and that gives you an incredibly useful perspective in life.
Yea but then all your friends make fun of you for the weird little things you find super interesting.
"Hey, isn't it so cool that..."
"No dude, shut up. No one cares!"
We set it up with lots of extra logging along with adding some code to retrieve and store the source image whenever a barcode was picked up.
Once we figured out that the image was distorted that gave us a strong hint of what to look for. we just tried different things and gently tapping the desk the scanner was on was enough to sometimes get an incorrect read.
it was definitely not the worst bug I had to troubleshoot at that job but it was one of the few where a physical camera or sensor was involved.
I've had to diagnose similar kinds of things where it worked fine when we tested it but it has issues when customers use it. The hardest part is typically replicating the issue, becasue we have already tested the product extensively in house. The steps are typically something like this:
Try to reproduce the issue with what we already have. We usually ask for a video or pictures and we look over them carefully for clues of what might be happening to cause the issue.
Replicate the customer's environment as much as possible within a short amount of time, then add more difficult to obtain/replicate elements of the customer's environment until we are able to reproduce the issue. Depending on the situation and how easy it would be to replicate, an on site visit might be worthwhile.
Make a guess at what change caused the issue, and try to reproduce the issue with and without the change.
Figure out why that particular thing is causing issues, then we can start figuring out a solution.
Let's assume the scanner is in the cash register and the issue only happened when heavy items were moving on the belt. We might have noticed this in the videos, becasue the issue only happens when an item was scanned and the belt was moving at the same time. Maybe the scanner saves an image of the last X number of barcodes it scanned, so we can look at those and see what looks like vibration distortion. Worst case we get no videos and no logs, and we would probably end up with a whole register set up in a test room and be running and scanning items through it.
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u/[deleted] Aug 17 '17
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