DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Software Disease Diagnostic

I got House M.D. season 2 as a christmas present and now I’v been watching it through. In it Dr. House is trying to find the right diagnostic before the patient dies. Making the right diagnostic is really important as otherwhise they won’t be able to cure the patient. The same thing apply in software development.

In software development you have a bug (disease), but before you can fix it (cure it) you’ll have to know what is causing it (do diagnostic). The bug causes problems (crashes, etc. – symptoms). You can’t always do the diagnostic just by looking at the symptoms, as those might match to bunch of diseases. You’ll have to do tests to get more information about the disease. Decrease the amount of possible diseases until you have only one left, it is an iterative process.

How long it takes to do the right diagnostic depends mostly on experience. If you have met the disease or heard of it earlier, you are probably able to cut down the list of possible diseases or even find it immediately. And that, ladies and gentleman, is really important as we spent most of our time on finding the right diagnostic, e.g. what is causing the bug. Time is money and we don’t want to spend too much time(money) on fixing bugs.

Now to make it harder to get diseases you’ll need some protection against them :

• Good coding practices.
• Testing (there are 2 articles about testing at Tips & Tricks).
• Know what you are doing before you do it!
  • Most of the bugs are created when we don’t pay attention to what we are doing or we don’t know what we are doing.

I have heard that you should not compare software development to anything else. Bull shit, everything can be compared. As far as I’m concerned different things should be compared, otherwhise you’ll miss different point of views and oppurtunity to learn, e.g. if somebody else is doing it better. One thing that makes a huge difference on skills :

• People who are open to new things
  • Learn from everything they can, multiple point of views.
    
• People who aren’t open to new things
  • Limitted to their own point of view.

So my advices are :

• Keep your mind open.
• Compare things to get new point of views and oppurtunities to learn.
• If you find something better, use it!