Watching the file Access

This week I stumbled upon a bug that was quite difficult to reproduce. It had to do with file locking and two separate processes competing for the file. I thought that this might be the case but the developers were adamant that it was not. So, where I work, if a developer says you are wrong, you are wrong until proven otherwise. Since I knew I was right – or at least thought I was strongly enough to take the time to prove it – I started to look for a way to see what is happing to a file.

I needed to be able to see which process was opening what files at what time. So I went over to the IT team at my company and asked if they had such a beast. They proved yet again that they can anticipate my every desire and had such a program installed on the computer I wanted to use it on. So I spent about 20 minutes setting up the scenario and logging the results with the program and had the information to prove the developer wrong. It felt so good.

The nifty little program that has now been added to my list of must-have programs can be found at. http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html It takes a little work to get it to do what you want but everything worth having does. I would recommend it to all testers as well as developers