Thursday, April 30, 2015

On the great joy of reproducing a bug

Dave Winer completely nails it: Reproducible

This is the kind of "bug report" that makes programming for users so frustrating. You hear a user is losing data, but have absolutely no idea how to reproduce the problem. It's something you've never seen the software do, can't imagine it actually doing. The description sounds like magic, but nothing in software happens by magic, all programmers will tell you. I believe it's happening but I have no idea why.

And then, after plenty of work and sweat and tears

we had arrived at the Holy Moment in debugging -- reproducibility. I told him "reproducible" is the programmer's favorite word. If you can tell me the steps to reproduce the problem, then I can find it and fix it. Until it's reproducible all I can do is share your frustration.

Amen.

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