How to reduce software bugs in sofware projects

 5 hints for reducing bugs in software program development projects

Every software system has bugs — let’s s analyze a few hints to reduce them while coding.

   

Bugs refer to unexpected behaviors of software systems. Bugs have different severity levels.

Some bugs block the user from doing some straightforward actions; some bugs halt a part of your software system, and sometimes, the entire software system may halt due to a critical bug. In most scenarios, the community/userbase finds workarounds to skip software bugs. For example, we often see several blog posts, video tutorials, and GitHub repositories to solve bugs and limitations in software frameworks.

Bugs occur due to various reasons: coding errors, errors in dependencies, and hardware failures.

1 .Think Twice Before Using a Dependency

Programmers often use dependency libraries to save their time while writing code. For example, if you need to build a Nodejs-based CLI program, you may select Commander.js without parsing command-line arguments by yourself. Dependency libraries help programmers to minimize logical errors and development time. But, dependency libraries may reduce your code quality, introduce limitations, and introduce new bugs too.

2. Retest Everything Even After a Simple Refactoring

Think about how programmers initialize their software projects. Some development teams turn proof-of-concept (POC) projects into production-ready software. Meanwhile, a few programmers even design the structure of the codebase before they start writing code. However, most software products were started as POCs. For example, look at the Flutter framework’s initial codebase and compare it with the current project structure.

  

 3. Avoid Keeping Quick Patches in the Main Codebase

No programmer can write perfect code that has no bugs, no minor design patterns flaws, and no hidden logical issues. The code you are preparing to commit today may contain hidden bugs that you have to fix tomorrow. Three parties will detect bugs in the code you wrote: you, testers, and users. When programmers notice a bug occurred in the user’s end, they often try to solve it by applying quick patches.

These quick patches are also known as hotfixes in some development scenarios. Those patches make users happy but may reduce code quality and create more bugs sometimes. Therefore, it is always good to leisurely implement a proper fix if possible.

4 .Write Clean Code With a Good Code Style Guide

Every senior engineer motivates their project’s junior engineers to write clean code to maintain the source code’s quality. The clean-code practices help us to make our codebases less error-prone, well-understandable, and well-extendable. Every codebase has a unique logical flow based on inputs and conditional statements. We can draw a directed graph structure according to that logical flow.

The clean code practices help us to reduce the complexity of the logical-flow graph. When your codebase is not clean and has spaghetti code, that graph becomes complex. Then programmers may struggle to draw this logical structure in their minds to apply code modifications. As a result, your software system’s upcoming features may contain more bugs.

5 Rethink Your Error Handling Strategy

All software systems do four generic actions: capture inputs, process data, store information, and display/return information. Every user action has an expected result. For example, if you use Angular CLI to create a new single-page application (SPA), we expect the ng new command will scaffold a new app. Sometimes, software programs cannot give the expected results during run-time.

In those situations, programmers write error-handling code to give an alternative result instead of the expected result. Programmers use different approaches to handle errors. Some programmers use if-else conditions and check error codes. Meanwhile, some programmers use exceptions and catch them with try-catch blocks.

Unhandled errors may cause system crashes. Also, continuing program execution with errored inputs may crash your system or persist invalid information in the software system’s storage. Make sure that your error handling approach is good enough to produce a better alternative result. Otherwise, error-handling flaws may create long-running bugs that we can’t fix easily.

cheers!

thanks for reading

ken