Code That Fits in Your Head: Heuristics for Software Engineering

12 Troubleshooting

Professional software development consists of more than feature development. There are also meetings, time reports, compliance activities, and ... defects.

You run into errors and problems all the time. Your code doesn’t compile, the software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, it runs too slowly, et cetera.

The better you get at solving problems, the more productive you are. Most of your troubleshooting skills may be based on “the shifting sands of individual experience” [4], but there are techniques that you can apply.

This chapter presents some of them.

12.1 Understanding

The best advice I can think of is this:

Try to understand what’s going on.

If you don’t understand why something doesn’t work¹, then make understanding ...