Lingering Defect

I like debugging code and solving defects.

And I like reading someone else's code and understanding it.

So these two come into conflict when the defect is in a black box system (from my view).

I interact with the web service, I have integration tests against it, I have ideas on how it should work.

And so when these are all raising red flags to me, I raise up the issue, since sadly I can do nothing about it.

All I can do is provide evidence of the bug as best I can.

Response comparisons between environments, screen shots of views using the service, etc.

And hope for another developer to investigate, and prove me right or wrong.

But it doesn't always work, and can lead to meeting after meeting, to just point fingers (ie "not me, must be you").

Am I mistaken? Is it my client code? What did I change? Can't I see it's working?

Which is all together frustrating.

Really what I want to do is just look though the code myself, but I cannot.

And I imagine a manager's perspective is not the best for discussing a specific defect.

With no personal knowledge of the code or of recent changes or a developer's secret "fix" that may break another part of the system,

a response like "nothing has changed" would be expected.

And I'm sure completely wrong. Code is always changing, or we would be out of a job.

(I know these are sweeping generalizations, this is purely ranting)