https://henrikwarne.com/2016/04/28/learning-from-your-bugs/
https://henrikwarne.com/2013/05/05/great-programmers-write-debuggable-code/
A bad programmer think: “this should be ok”.
A good programmer think: “this can be wrong”.
Logging is important and help you to see a problem (many programmers dont know about a problem) and it help you to find a problem quick.
12 Practical Tips for Building Bug-Free Software
1. Code Reviews
2. Beta Tests
3. Automated Tests
4. Logging
Using log files or live logging during development and production usage is an important and useful technique to identify bugs, find concurrency problems and to analyze and find out why an application crashed. Advanced logging tools are also able to log complete objects, trace threads and distributed systems and offer rich viewer tools to monitor your application.
5. Error Reporting
To find and resolve errors and exceptions, you first have to know what kind of errors your users and customers are experiencing. Many users of trial software won’t get in touch with you to report any errors. Instead, they will just uninstall your application and test a competing product. To make error reporting for end-users easier and more useful to you, you should use automated error and exception reporting techniques. When an unhandled exception occurs, your application should show a friendly dialog offering the user to send an error report back to the developer. Error reports should contain all kind of information to help you identify the problem, including error messages, call stacks, version numbers and log files.
6. Customer Feedback
You can also use a short (optional) survey when a user uninstalls your application. This survey should only have a few questions and besides other things ask why the user uninstalled your software.
7. Use Proven Code
8. Dedicated Testers
others test your code and functionality, because general wisdom says that developers do a really bad job testing software that they wrote themselves.
10. Write a Specification
11. Use a Good Debugger
12. Debug and Strict Options
Many development environments allow you to enable special debugging options like range checking, overflow checking and memory corruption checking. Such options should be enabled during development and sometimes even during quality assurance to identify hard to find bugs. Many script languages like Perl or PHP on the other hand allow you to enable certain rules and warnings that will force you to declare variables before using them. This is especially useful if a script language is case-sensitive and it’s easy to make typos.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/115528/how-to-make-a-program-bug-free-or-with-the-less-possible-bugs
Coding. What mistakes did I make in the code? Did I forget an else-part? Was there a system call that failed, but the response wasn’t checked? How can I adjust my coding to avoid these problems in the future?
Testing. Sometimes it is clear from the bug that it should have been caught in testing. If so, testing at which point – unit, functional, system? What test case was missing?
Debugging. How could I have sped up finding this bug? Did I have the right tools? Did I assume too much? Do I need better logging in the code?
The problem with debugging is that it’s plain unproductive: Every minute you spend in a debugger trying to analyze an issue is wasted time because you are NOT productive, i.e. you are not adding ANY value to the code base. Compare this with writing tests: Every minute you spent writing a test is adding value to your code base. It’s an investment which provides a return EVERY time you run the test code.
https://henrikwarne.com/2013/05/05/great-programmers-write-debuggable-code/
A bad programmer think: “this should be ok”.
A good programmer think: “this can be wrong”.
Logging is important and help you to see a problem (many programmers dont know about a problem) and it help you to find a problem quick.
12 Practical Tips for Building Bug-Free Software
1. Code Reviews
2. Beta Tests
3. Automated Tests
4. Logging
Using log files or live logging during development and production usage is an important and useful technique to identify bugs, find concurrency problems and to analyze and find out why an application crashed. Advanced logging tools are also able to log complete objects, trace threads and distributed systems and offer rich viewer tools to monitor your application.
5. Error Reporting
To find and resolve errors and exceptions, you first have to know what kind of errors your users and customers are experiencing. Many users of trial software won’t get in touch with you to report any errors. Instead, they will just uninstall your application and test a competing product. To make error reporting for end-users easier and more useful to you, you should use automated error and exception reporting techniques. When an unhandled exception occurs, your application should show a friendly dialog offering the user to send an error report back to the developer. Error reports should contain all kind of information to help you identify the problem, including error messages, call stacks, version numbers and log files.
6. Customer Feedback
You can also use a short (optional) survey when a user uninstalls your application. This survey should only have a few questions and besides other things ask why the user uninstalled your software.
7. Use Proven Code
8. Dedicated Testers
others test your code and functionality, because general wisdom says that developers do a really bad job testing software that they wrote themselves.
10. Write a Specification
11. Use a Good Debugger
12. Debug and Strict Options
Many development environments allow you to enable special debugging options like range checking, overflow checking and memory corruption checking. Such options should be enabled during development and sometimes even during quality assurance to identify hard to find bugs. Many script languages like Perl or PHP on the other hand allow you to enable certain rules and warnings that will force you to declare variables before using them. This is especially useful if a script language is case-sensitive and it’s easy to make typos.
- Do you use source control?
- Can you make a build in one step?
- Do you make daily builds?
- Do you have a bug database?
- Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
- Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
- Do you have a spec?
- Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
- Do you use the best tools money can buy?
- Do you have testers?
- Do new candidates write code during their interview?
- Do you do hallway usability testing?
