Hey this is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric.
I make Apps now today let's answer the question do you fix
every single bug you come across.
All right so today I'm coming to you once again from the beautiful town of Goring which is about a half
an hour away from the office.
Every time I'm in town I have to stop and do the video here because the scenery is just so beautiful
right. So today I want to answer a question that came in last week on episode 454
which was called "Bugs Happen", in that video I was talking about how I release a client
application and I've gone through all testing all all users they tested it all the testers tested
it but we have this one little mistake go through it we just fixed it right away right.
Thank you everyone for not giving give me a hard time about that.
You know sometimes things do go through you go through all the testing
and things do go out into production and it's you know it's never a nice thing right.
But there was a really good question on that video from Mr Neptune who said have you
fix every single bug you've came across right.
Have I fixed every single bug I've come across in our code.
Yeah sure. Sure why not.
As far as you guys though. Yes.
OK. I have to say no I haven't sometimes.
If you have a bug in your app or in a client's application.
Sometimes it's really easy to fix sometimes it happens.
It happens every single time it's totally 100 percent reproducible rate you say.
So he says this thing is not working. If you click on here you go oh yeah.
Oh cool. Thank you for pointing that out. And then you go
and do it if you don't catch it yourself. Most of the time you catch yourself
but sometimes you do. A gadget
but sometimes it's a bit more rare that sometimes might happen like say one in every five
occurrences. So you tested a few times.
Maybe you spend an hour testing it out.
Oh it's happening there what happened there. What was different about that time than the other time.
I want to put some stats some log traces in there.
I'm going to have long kept going on and have all these logs going everywhere I go check the analytics
if it's already in production that's fine.
But every so often you'll get a bug that is super rare
like it may happen one in every thousand occurrences
and you just can't seem to reproduce it
and you can't pinpoint what's happening.
You run a few theories are you working up a theory thinking it could be this
but how do we test that changes here.
Oh it's not that, it's not that sometimes you could spend days trying to track down one of these tricky
little bugs and the decision has to be made.
Are we going to release with this in the application because we can't seem to figure out what it is
and every time we write it our sample size is just too small we can figure out what it is
and sometimes from my own application that I will make a decision.
OK. This is no longer a bug.
This is a known issue which means I won't release it anyway
and if people come back with feedback and say that's something that's happening we're investigating it because we
can only hold up good life for so long.
We can not go lie because of this one issue that affects you that happens
one out of every thousand occurrences of running the application.
So that could happen. If its a client.
It's up to the client will say hey we're trying to track this thing down.
We could be another week on this try to figure out there's one little bug
and this there were scope creep comes right you've quoted everything you have there's one little thing.
And sometimes it's in the application sometimes it could be on the API that you don't control
you just like when you don't know you don't know when you're making guesses on what it is
but you try to track it down. Most of the time like 99 percent the time you could figure out what it is
but that 1 percent of the time.
You do you have to decide what are we going to go live
or we just go are we going to spend the next however long begin this hour because you could always do an update.
Right you could always do an update. Yes Mr Neptune I'm afraid to say I have not
fixed everything about bug I've come across.
But we do everything we can reproduce every one that we could we could reproduce
and test. We do other times we make assumptions based on it which never really
shows. Sometimes the problem with this when you can't reproduce the bug is.
Sometimes you don't know if it's environmental or there's only happened
or what kind of device you just asking questions from a third party.
Did it was the internet available.
Did you run out of memory did disk space tell me something about the environment long term you can
give that information. So are you making guesses based on that.
And sometimes I have something which I call a phantom bug which is somebody says they've there's
a bug in this application is that loading the data
or whatever and you start asking questions on one of the big ones.
Do you have an internet connection right. You have an internet connection because it says you don't have an internet connection.
Are you sure you have an internet connection and else say yes.
And you know what you say can you please send me a screenshot
and I'll say I told you what the error says and I said yeah
but just humor me and send a screenshot
and they'll send you a screenshot and you would just circle on the bar is at the top.
There's no Internet on this phone right.
You were completely out of range of everything.
This kind of stuff happens sometimes in those kind of things could waste a lot of time because you're constantly
looking for. So. My question to you guys is am I a bad person
for thinking like this. Right. My question to you guys.
Have you ever released a bug or a.
The reason I call it a known issue is because it's something that we know about.
We know the this we haven't quite found the solution for it
but we're putting it out there and it's a known issue if you put it out to a larger sample size like
your app users you'll start to see the pattern
and you start to see it in analytics you say it's only affecting this version of Android was only affecting this.
It's all these manufacturer
or whatever and then you can start to really drill down
but sometimes you just can can find it. So have you ever released that app
or do you fix every single bug you've come across?
And that is it for today. I'll talk to you, guys, again tomorrow!