Skip to Content
Understanding Software
book

Understanding Software

by Max Kanat-Alexander
September 2017
Beginner
278 pages
4h 24m
English
Packt Publishing
Audiobook available
Content preview from Understanding Software

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 ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Righting Software

Righting Software

Juval Lowy
Software Requirements, 3rd Edition

Software Requirements, 3rd Edition

Karl Wiegers, Joy Beatty

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781788628815