Find the Real Cause
Eventually you will find something that a working system does not do. You shouldn't immediately assume you've found the cause of the problem when you see this, though. For example, maybe it logs a message saying, "Error: insects are eating all the cookies." One way that you could "fix" that behavior would be to delete the log message. Now the behavior is like normal, right? No, wrong – the actual bug is still happening.
That's a pretty stupid example, but people do less-stupid versions of this that don't fix the bug. They don't get down to the basic cause of the problem, as I explain in Chapter 16, Make It Never Come Back. Instead they paper over the bug with some workaround that lives in the codebase forever and causes complexity ...
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