Fixing bugs isn’t the problem.
Figuring out how they occur, now that’s the problem. That’s where we get hung up and where we spend the bulk of our time. That’s where we grind the gears trying to figure out what we are doing and what the next should be.
And though this is the hardest of steps, it’s the most rewarding, we learn the most from them. If someone just gave us the answer and told us to put X code in Y line, we would never learn anything. We would simply learn how to be great cut and pasters of code.
And yet, if this is the most important part of the job, we struggle with knowing how to diagnose and come up with a plan on how to figure out where to go, and what to do.
Questions like…
What is happening?
Where are the logs?
Can we line information up?
What happened before/during/after?
What was the end result?
There are many more that go in here, but if you don’t have that stock list, your path to finding the bug, will always be fraught with frustration.
