<Bug prevention in five minutes ⁄ >

These are some notes from a lightning talk I did at STAR East. I didn't say everything below, but I probably said most of it plus some other stuff. Nobody counted officially, but I am positive that I packed more words into my five minutes than any of the other eight speakers.

How many of you have found bugs? Anybody ever found the same bug twice? Ever found the same bug two different areas of the product - or the same type of bug in two completely different applications? If you haven't, you will. That's why we have heuristics and patterns to identify bugs - we know that certain types of bugs will always exist, so we test for them. The problem (for me), is that we keep on finding those same bugs.

Maybe you haven't got there yet, but I hate finding the same bugs over and over "oh look, I put a really big number into the text field and something goes wrong". Not again... I love a challenge, and for me, I get the most satisfaction - the biggest smile on my face, when I find a bug that would make Sherlock Holmes (or the guys on CSI) proud. The problem is that there are so many of the "easy" - "fish in a barrel" bugs that I don't get to spend enough time digging, investigating, and finding those really interesting bugs.

The idea behind bug prevention (or defect prevention) is to take the big buckets of bugs - bugs that happen often, and implement some sort of prevention technique. Not always the easiest thing to do, but usually very effective.



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