> the bug is actually 3 bugs I hate these ones in particular. My debugging strategy is generally like a surgeon's: do no harm. When investigating a bug I try t

> the bug is actually 3 bugs I hate these ones in particular. My debugging strategy is generally like a surgeon's: do no harm. When investigating a bug I try to have as absolutely few moving parts as possible. Otherwise it's too easy to create knock-on bugs or interfere with the repro. Many times I have "fixed" a bug by changing something only to later realize that all I did was cause the repro to no longer manifest it. My process is usually something like: 1. Come up with hypothesis for cause. 2. Fix the code according to that hypothesis. 3. Did it work? If so, done. If not undo all changes from step 2 and try again with a new hypothesis. But when a bug is the confluence of several issues, that step 3 can make it impossible to find a fix. I hate having to make multiple speculative changes (especially when the right fix could be any of the exponential number of combinations of them). Often I end up going in circles because I realize there must be multiple different problems interacting to cause the issue.