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Solved mission critical problem using reverse engineering

Here I'm sharing an incident that happened in 2017, when I had managed to solve a mission critical problem using reverse engineering and what I have learnt from it.

The incident was when I have been allocated a migration task. My whole project was migrated to webpack from system.js due to which integration build generator broke. So I got this task to migrate that integration build generator too and make it compatible to webpack within a week. I knew that I got this after another colleague failed to complete it in previous sprint. So there was a higher chance of missing the deadline because half of the time was already got consumed by previous colleague. I got this issue when it was about to be escalated in case I fail.

I thought if I'll go by the same path as my colleague then I may get the same result that he got. So I changed my strategy and look into the problem by reverse engineering it. Well, doing that gave me enough hints to solve the problem and fix the generator by having minimal impact. So after doing further analysis, I'd managed to fix the issue in 40% less time than was initially expected.

From this incident I learnt that sometimes it's good to see the problem from reverse angle instead of just front view.

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