How long did you spend looking for the bug?

Question

Programming

Or how to explain to the boss that he was looking for an extra comma for two days?

Answer 1

If the bug reproduces, and the time from the start of the program to the moment when the effect caused by this bug is less than 10 minutes (under the debugger), then usually a day is enough. Provided that it is not caused by a misunderstanding of the behavior of someone else's program (say, a poorly documented format of their input data, which should be produced by my program).
If the bug occurs rarely, depends on the hardware and computer on which the launch is taking place, then years can go away. Log files are analyzed, the place where something went wrong is clarified, additional intermediate checks are invented, additional debug printing - and the program is sent back to work, until the next manifestation of the bug.

Answer 2

Or how to explain to the boss that he was looking for an extra comma for two days?

Nasialnika, not to know the units, not to be able to work as a dibugger, computer shaitanama!

Answer 3

The longest I was looking for was a buffer overflow bug in the biometrics server that caused an instant crash when processing certain fingerprints. To catch the bug, we had to take a database backup from the client and a network traffic dump that preceded the service crash.
The bug was in a third-party library, the developers of which swore that the allocated buffer should be enough in all cases, until they were sent a problematic print. After that, the developers said - "well, we made a little mistake, it happens. We need to transfer the buffer twice as much." In total, the bug was fixed for two months.
However, I did not stop there, and now all the buffers passed to that library are in separate areas of virtual memory, surrounded by reserved pages. There was no more such problem.

Answer 4

It depends on what kind of bug ....
On one familiar site, sql injection has been working for more than a year: D
Well, on average, I'm looking for 5-30 minutes.
If the code is too big, then it can take a long time.

Answer 5

Once upon a time, after 10 hours of work, I was looking for an error in the query for 2 hours, reduced everything to select * form contacts, the error was "FROM keyword not found where expected".
I made a conclusion for myself: if I can’t find an error within 15-20 minutes, I get distracted, I drink coffee. Then, if I can’t find the problem right away, debuggers, etc., as described above.
So explain - I searched for and fixed the problem within 2 days.

Answer 6

in libc, ssl, bash bugs live for decades.
If you have been looking for a comma for 2 days - sorry, but find 5 differences in the string "aaieeeooop". don't you see? but they are.
If you can't find an error in a line, you need to COMPLETELY rewrite it FROM ZERO, in parts

Answer 7

Maximum searched for a bug 10 working days. Fixed 10 minutes)

Answer 8

And I once wrote SELECT * FROMtogether. I searched for this error for 30-40 minutes