How do you test for lost updates

Rick and Liz call for a review into the application's safety. This leads to a software change to prevent lost updates. How would you test it?

In a web app, you might mimic each user by opening a new browser tab. Using Google Chrome's incognito mode for example. Or you might run the application on two machines. How robust would these tests be?

And what if the users were software threads rather than people. Triggered to send almost simultaneous database updates? You would need a different test.

Use this guide to test such scenarios. It is a response to recommendations found in a 2018 report.

Practical tips

Welsh Admin Portal -- Root Cause Analysis

An investigation into why some patients were not assigned to waiting lists in the Welsh Patient Administration System concluded that;

'The design and implementation did not account for (or handle) the potential for concurrency conflicts...Routine testing did not identify the issue'