This blog post was started a LONG time ago … after moving the blog from my in-house server to an external server, I’ve decided to finish it.
This may sound like a no brainer … but I’ve found this bit of advice is sometimes ignored…
Fix the problem, not the symptom!
I’ve been struggling with a bug fix for the past few days, trying to figure out what was going wrong.
The difficulty I’m having is: a previous change had been made to fix a customer reported bug … but I can’t figure out WHY this particular approach was used.
After debugging the problem I’m trying to solve, on the customers system, I figured out what was going wrong. It’s actually pretty straight forward.
But looking at the previous fix, the best I can determine is that the change that was made was to fix a very specific symptom.
Had the programmer who did the first fix spent a bit more time on the issue, I confident the actual problem would have become apparent. I suspect that the pressure of a customer waiting on a fix was the impetus to fix the symptom instead of the problem.
Nonetheless, it’s far better to spend a bit more time trying to determine what’s causing the issue rather than getting a fix for the specific symptom out quickly.