How to Fix Bugs

All developers have to deal with bugs, and this is a general overview of how to fix them

New Bug by XKCD

All software contains bugs. Bugs are just a reality of software development, and much as product managers would see them as pure waste, fixing them does add value. As developers, we have a responsibility to deal with bugs as quickly and effectively as possible. In this article, I will share some strategies for achieving this.

Don’t Write Them

The absolutely best way to deal with bugs is not to write them in the first place. Raise your hand if you’ve written // TODO or // FIXME over a fresh piece of code. Don’t do this! If you find yourself writing code and then adding // FIXME straight after, you are knowingly and intentionally adding bugs to your code. Not writing bugs is much easier than writing bugs and fixing them later, so let’s start by not intentionally writing bugs.

Don’t Fix Them

Another approach to bugs, intentional or otherwise, is to leave them alone. For certain trivial bugs or corner cases that only affect a small proportion of users in a non-invasive way, this is a perfectly valid approach.

In a healthy development workflow, bugs should be triaged and prioritised against other areas of development, such as developing new features, architecture, paying down technical debt, and infrastructure work. Some questions you may want to ask are:

• Is fixing the bug a higher priority than a given feature, and would fixing it add more customer value?
• Is the cost of fixing the bug greater or less than implementing a given feature, or of fixing other higher-priority bugs?

Generally, we want to always be working on the highest value work items, so if the development-cost-to-customer-value ratio is higher than other competing priorities, it might be best to just ignore the bug, at least for now.

Use an Issue Tracker

You can’t fix bugs you don’t know about. Therefore an issue tracker is an essential piece of the toolbox for recording and resolving bugs. It can be used to store a list of current bugs, prioritise them, record information, and communicate status back to…