In the product end game, every change carries significant risk, episode 2

This article discusses a sporadic bug encountered during the Word 97 release cycle and the challenges of debugging it. It highlights the use of in-circuit emulators to investigate issues that resist traditional debugging methods.

From the article

A colleague related this story of a bug that arose at the very end of the Word 97 release cycle.

Testing had identified a ship-stopping bug in a somewhat common code path. The bad news is that the bug was sporadic. The good news is that the test team had come up with a script that could trigger the crash in the lab with fairly good reliability. The bad news is that the bug went away when you used the debugger.

The development team was very anxious, because a bug that appears only sporadically in the lab is going to occur regularly in the wild . But how do you debug a problem that resists debugging?

Share this resource