Monday, February 20, 2012

How will I learn from this experience?

I've just spent two days trying to figure out why some software that I wrote wasn't working as expected. It wasn't particularly difficult code but of middling complexity. To make matters more puzzling, this code was very similar to two other programs I just wrote a couple of days ago very quickly and without problems.

After two days of trying everything I could think of (and retrying many of them) I finally found the answer. It was a dumb mistake that I kept overlooking. It was similar to this error:

Because I was low on milk, I drove my trusty black Honda CRV to
to the grocery store.

In the example above, it is easy to miss the fact that there are two "to"s. My bug was like that but I didn't notice it for two days.

Ok, a big waste of time for a dumb mistake, but how can I avoid doing the same thing tomorrow?

• Give it some attention. Write about it (as you see here). Tell someone about it (if you want a reputation as a sparkling conversationalist). Attention aids memory retention.
• Keep a journal of lessons learned. Journaling has two benefits. First, you will be more likely to remember because you're giving the experience attention. Second, if your journal is searchable, you can find and reread the entry even if you can't remember all the details immediately. My journal is just a large text document. I can search it for text strings. I also head each entry with the date so I can search by date too.
• Another technique is to make a process change. For example, I might have a process rule that said, if I'm still mystified by some crazy bug after an hour, just throw out the code and rewrite it. This one is tough to do because you always believe that the epiphany is just about to come. But if I had had the discipline to apply a rule like this, I would have been done in two hours rather than two days.

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Keywords: continuous improvement