Erroneously uninformative

First of all, forgive me for this work related rant. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, or rather the guilty.

Throughout the IT world, it is generally accepted that errors will occur. Sometimes due to sloppiness, sometimes due to unforeseen events and some just cause the error Gods get bored and decided to spice up the lives of all the IT drones. The cause of errors are varied but the one thing that is usually fairly standard is that the error will tell you what went wrong and allow the developers or maintainers of the application to fix it.

One group of people we have been working with for close to 5 years now have a Web Service which we query several times a minute to retrieve data. In this 5 year period there is one error which we frequently receive that has never been fixed.

“What is this error?” you are probably wondering. Well … honestly, I wish I new. In fact, we don’t even know that it is just one error. The reason being is that ever so helpful error which the application returns to us is:

Server was unable to process request. --> Index (zero based) must be greater than or equal to zero and less than the size of the argument list.

Useful, to say the least. The whole point of error messages is to be informative and help you diagnose what went wrong and then fix it. This error, in effect, is saying “There was an error in the web service”. As to why, or where, well if it is being logged the customer is being very quiet about it.

We know the error is coming from the customers web service. They claim it’s our application. We want to get it sorted for numerous reasons, they don’t seem to care. One possibility is they don’t know how, as I believe it was a contractor that wrote the web service for them, but they certainly won’t admit that.

So basically we’re stuck with the error occurring (seemingly) at random. All we can do is monitor it and our end and each time it fails continually re-try the request until it magically starts working.

The customer is always right? Yeah, that’ll be shining bright!