Bugs of the day, 2013-04-11

Don’t delete code that does things

I got carried away while deleting some code that didn’t do anything and accidentally removed some parts that did do things — function calls with side effects that I didn’t fully understand. I make the same kind of change later to a different part of the codebase and got it right there. I didn’t think to go back and look for the possibility of this problem in my earlier change.

This one got checked in and caused problems for others later. It would have been caught by better testing on my part. (I’m convinced that I did test this and saw no problems, so either I didn’t actually test a build with the change or I my testing wasn’t really testing of the code affected)

Unravel the whole garment

In a related deletion, I managed to break another piece of code connected to one that I was modifying. I broke one of the assumptions of the other piece of code, which was far less obvious to me because they interacted via a mechanism that I was not familiar with.

Again, this would have been caught by better testing on my part.

My apologies to those affected. Clearly, I suck.

(On the upside, I’ve now learned a little bit more about another part of the codebase. This is a good thing.)

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