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How did you fix the hardest bug that you have ever seen?

"Holy shit"

Have you ever fixed a feature that has a lot of issues? I had met this situation. I would like to tell you my process to deal with it.

My problem: Fixing the wrong validation after hitting the F5 on a page.

Step 1. List out all of issues that I met on this feature.

Yeah, after hitting F5, I got:
- The validation dialog could not be closed.
- The data of the page could not be reverted the previous data.
- I wonder why it automatically called the new select event on the combobox on the page?

Step 2. Fix the problem: issue by issue, simple to complicated.

- Try to close the dialog -> solved
- Try to revert the previous data -> solved
- Try to fix the last issue -> I was so confused about this case. I spent haft day find the root caused but I could not solve it. I decided go to step 3.

Step 3. Tell to other members about my problems. Discussing for the win!

There are six people in the discussing. We had a lot of guessing, a lot of investigating, a lot of ideas, so on. And..., we finally figured out the root cause is related to the "focusing" and "focusing out".

In my opinion, the key for solving this problem is keeping our mind calm during the time fixing and listening to someone when we get stuck at some items.

How do you think about that?


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