Archive for October, 2008

Bug cluster phenomenon

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 Nigel Jones

I was debugging a piece of code recently when I realized that there was a scenario, albeit unlikely, in which a divide by zero could occur. Rather than just fix the bug and move on, I invoked what I call the “bug cluster phenomenon” rule. What you may ask is this rule? Well it has two variants. The first is as follows:

“Where there is one bug, there is usually another”. I’ve observed this phenomenon over many years. What seems to happen is that when I (or anyone else for that matter) is generating a block of code, I get interrupted, or I’m tired or my focus is elsewhere. As a result, when I create one bug, I usually create several others while I am at it. Thus when I find a bug in a function, I always assume that it has company near bye. In short, finding a bug in a function always triggers a top to bottom review of that function and its neighbors. This has dramatically reduced my debugging time over the years – and I strongly recommend you adopt it.

The second variant of the rule is as follows:

“Logical errors normally have company”. I’ve also observed this phenomenon over many years. In this case, it seems that if you have made a particular error in logic in one place in the code, the chances are you have made the same error elsewhere. In the case of the divide by zero issue mentioned in the introduction, this prompted me to wonder if I had any other possible divide by zero errors lurking in my code. As a result, I performed a search through the entire project – and sure enough I found a few other cases where there existed the possibility of a divide by zero error. Thus finding one bug caused me to fix several. That’s efficient debugging!

Incidentally, I was able to quickly find all the divisions in my code because I am absolutely anal about having a space on either side of an operator. Thus, I needed to search for only two strings – ” / ” and ” /= “. I’ve observed that many people are lackadaisical about this, such that you’ll often see expressions such as “y=a/b”. These people have no option other than to search either for just “/” – which of course returns every line with a comment, or they have to construct a more sophisticated regular expression search – which again takes time and is error prone.

Thus I have three pieces of advice to pass on:
1. When you find a bug, look nearby for more.
2. If the bug was of a particular class of bug, then search your code to see if you had made the same mistake elsewhere.
3. Write your code so that it is trivial to search for certain constructs. It will save you time in the long run.

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