Best software practices: debugging and error handling

Best practices related to debugging and error handling. Gathered from various sources.

• Fail fast.
• Badly designed systems tend to poison systems they interact with.
• Flexibility breeds bugs.
• Never ignore errors.
• Presence of errors indicates that you don’t understand your system well enough.
• Make a clear distinction between critical and non-critical errors.
• Every assert becomes a proper error handling eventually.
• Add logging and error handling early.
• Assume no coincidences, investigate.
• Adress problem directly, not with workaround.
• Most mistakes in software design result from assuming that you will need to do something (or never do something) in the future.
• The world of computers is full of things that should have been strict from the beginning, and became ridiculously complex because they weren’t (HTML).
• Bugs most commonly come from somebody’s failure to reduce complexity. Less commonly, they come from a misunderstanding of something that was actually simple.
• When solving a problem in a codebase, you’re not done when the symptoms stop. You’re done when the problem has disappeared and will never come back .
• Debugging is accomplished by gathering data until you understand the cause of the problem.