Fix the Cause, Not the Symptoms
Some years ago, when working on embedded code written in C, I tracked a bug down to a function that looked something like this:
| | int process_items(item* item_array, int array_size) |
| | { |
| | int i; |
| | |
| | /* For some reason array_size is off by one, so fix it up here */ |
| | array_size++; |
| | |
| | for(i = 0; i < array_size; i++) { |
| | Process item_array[i] |
| | } |
| | } |
The developer in question (whose blushes I will save) had correctly determined, some months earlier, that the bug he was working on was “caused” by a bad value for array_size. However, instead of continuing his analysis to determine why the function was being called with a bad argument, he decided to make the bug “go away” by fixing it up in the function. ...
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