Talk done at Ruby Tuesday, a meet-up by facebook.com/groups/klxrb

1. The
Anatomy
of
a
Bug

2. Four Parts:
- Triage
- Reproduction
- Finding the Root Cause
- The Fix

3. But first...

4. Part 1: Triage
Identification & Priority

5. Is it
really
a
bug?

6. It is
a
bug!
It can be
“reproduced”, or at
least clearly seen to
be affecting users.

7. Let’s ask some questions to help us
assess the priority with which we
should fix this bug.

8. Who reported it?
me
other
developers
paying
customers
my
boss
CEO
QA
people
product
owner

9. Which environment?
development
staging
test
production

10. Who is affected?
that one user
who uses
Konqueror
a small
percentage
of users
only non-
paying
users
all users will
experience the
bug when using
the app
a large
percentage
of users

11. What happens?
deletes
user data
warning in log;
user experience
not affected
menu
misaligned
in Safari
users
cannot
give you
money

12. When did it start happening?
immediately after a
new feature was
released.
several days/weeks
after the last release
during a vendor outage
(payment gateway etc)

13. So, how urgent?

14. Part 2: Reproduction

15. Step 1:
Experience the bug in the
environment it appears in.

16. Step 2:
Set up your local environment so
that you can (manually) reproduce it
there.

17. Step 3:
Write a test that captures the bug. It
should fail.

18. Part 3: Finding the Root Cause
Time to break out the debugging tools!

19. puts / logging

20. better_errors

21. Airbrake

22. rails console

23. pry

24. byebug

25. pry on steroids
- pry-byebug
- pry-remote

26. Part 4: The Fix
- Two aspects: the spec
addition and the actual
fix.
- Don’t rush the fix, think
about the most correct
way to adjust the code.

27. Thanks :-)

28. We are hiring!
rrsoft.co/jobs