Everyone's greatest resource: Somebody else's time

IT analyst pilot fish gets an email message from a customer support tech he knows -- and the tech is frantic.

"He asked me, 'Were there any changes made to this module that would affect our customers? This process is not working for this very large customer and they are extremely upset,'" says fish.

So fish goes to work. First he looks through the history of changes to the module. He can't find any changes that have been made in the past four years -- and whatever the problem is, it certainly hasn't been going on that long for this customer.

But to confirm his findings, fish digs deeper. He installs each of the last four releases of the software containing the module, and tests everything to look for problems. It's a time-consuming process, but a couple days later he has an answer: No issues found.

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