bug solving poll

Per Soderlund

Have you guys ever found a bug or misbehaviour that you were unable to correct? I´ve had a bug haunting me for weeks that makes me wonder if there are unsolveable bugs out there. I lack experience since ive only been coding proffessionally for 5 years. If you had one,what was it and what made you give up?

Argonia

There aren't any unsolvable bugs . You just need to keep debugging until you find it. Bugs occur when there is code. If there is code then the bug can be fixed.

Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true

OriginalGriff

No. Bugs are errors: sometimes in the code, or the design, or the specification, or the way the user is working - though the last reflects more on the spec than anything else. And errors are fixable. If necessary, write them up in the manual, and then they are features, not bugs at all! :laugh:

The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.

vonb

OriginalGriff wrote:

then they are features, not bugs at all

That's the MS way of coding...

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Lost User

Yes. It was in RSA-signature-protected firmware. I would have had to crack the key in order to fix it.

OriginalGriff

MS write documentation? :omg: Why did nobody tell me? :laugh:

The only instant messaging I do involves my middle finger.

Per Soderlund

True, I know there arent any unsolveable bugs. I want to know if you came across any unsolveable bugs to you. Ones that you were unable to fix or maybe someone didnt give you time for it.

Per Soderlund

Sounds heavy. Was it your code to begin with?

Lost User

No, was it supposed to be a question about my own code only?

Dexterus

One so far. Solved it by sweeping it under the rug (customer request). 5 months of work. 2 people tried their hand at it. Still as much of a mystery. I would have still wanted to figure it out but lack of source code for the entire app (only ran at somebody else site) and the fact that it was tested on weekends only and it didn't show up every weekend of tests made it pretty rough. Worst that I've solved was about 2-3 months of work, and it was a stupidly simple root cause from the customer's side.

V 0

If there is no solution, there probably is a workaround.

V.
(MQOTD Rules and previous Solutions )

Argonia

No, i haven't find a bug that i cannot solve :) If you debug hard enough and if you find something that you cannot understand after you ask in the right place (for example here) you can fix everything :)

Microsoft ... the only place where VARIANT_TRUE != true

Tom Deketelaere

Unsolvable bug, no. Extremely difficult to solve and very time consuming, yes. I don't believe there is such a thing as unsolvable bugs, just bugs that can't be properly solved due to time and resource constraints.

grralph1

you beat me to it :thumbsup:

"Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read." Frank Zappa 1980

dan sh

1. Just wrap entire code with try-catch. Make sure you have a empty catch block. You can also write some code in catch block that actually does nothing. 2. Do not tell anyone about this in office. 3. Find credentials of your arch enemy in the team and check in with his credentials. 4. Tell this awesome story to others while enjoying a beer.

"Bastards encourage idiots to use Oracle Forms, Web Forms, Access and a number of other dinky web publishing tolls.", Mycroft Holmes[^]

Brady Kelly

I first read that subject line as "bug solving pill". Pass the Valium please.

Per Soderlund

Not really, was just asking how it was in your case.

Per Soderlund

Sounds abit like the one I´m wrestling with now. I´ve made a communications application which runs on 3 different computers where it mess up on only one computer every monday, sometimes every 2 mondays.(Bytes are being swapped and the numbers are wrong, tcp/ip). Cleaning buffers and restarting the socket solves it, until next monday or the monday after. I ran it on my own computer hooked to the system on the computer that mess up and it works. So its only on one PC that mess up, same config as the rest.

Lost User

Ok. There have been bugs in my own code that I didn't fix, but as far as I can remember, never because I was unable to. They were just too unimportant to spend time on. There have been bugs that were particularly hard to diagnose, such as a very sneaky non-admissible heuristic that was only incorrect about once in a million times and lead to a detectable error even more rarely, and various obscure race conditions.

Gary R Wheeler

I had a bug once that took over a year to find and correct. I never gave up on the problem, but I would leave it and come back to it, sometimes weeks later. This is the only time I was desperate enough to use a link map to figure out in release-compiled code where a crash was taking place (this was a native app). There's always a critical piece of information to understanding the problem that you don't find out until the end. Once you find that bit, the problem's straightforward to fix. In my case, my app would randomly crash at a couple customers' locations, approximately once a week. We make commercial ink-jet printing systems, and my app is the user interface for the machine. It turns out these customers were shutting down their press hardware, but leaving the controller computer powered up, with the UI sitting on a particular screen. Overnight this was okay, but over a weekend the crash seemed to happen more often. The critical piece of information was that the customers were leaving the app sitting at that screen for long periods. I could simulate this at my desk. Eventually, running the simulation speed very fast, I could cause the crash in a few minutes. As it turns out, the app was leaking a GDI handle during a polling operation, and when the app finally reached the limit, it would crash.

Software Zen: delete this;