As my project is getting towards the end, again, I'm doing a fair bit of debugging. Every so often, a horrible bug crops up that takes a few days, a week, two weeks to fix. Every time I have one, I try to think, on reflection, what could I have done to fix it quicker?
I've noticed a pattern emerging.
Briefly, bugs take me longer to fix when I allow myself to be seduced into chasing half-formed hypotheses as to what the bug is. These hypotheses often prove ill-founded, leading to wasted time that doesn't often add real data or evidence to your bug search. Really, those intermediate hypotheses are little more than speculation or conjecture.
I'm becoming increasingly aware that the more effective strategy is not to consider hypotheses until as late as possible; instead, concentrate on gathering data, evidence and devising test fixtures. This is a very difficult discipline as people naturally love to formulate hypotheses to explain things. They are seductive. They feel like you've found a short-cut to the solution, you've caught your quarry, the tension of the bug fix is over. You get to announce your triumph.
But it's rare that you fix the most difficult bugs with a single brilliant moment of insight. More often, it takes hours of analysis and evidence gathering. That's the most reliable way to reach a well-founded hypothesis that completely fixes the bug, rather than a partial fix, a temporary fix or a heisenbug fix.
