Monday, July 9, 2007 - Mon, 9 Jul 2007

I’ve been finding a lot of bothersome bugs over the last few months in Behold. The most annoying thing about many of them is that I was sure the code was at one time working. But somehow the bug would be introduced at a new version - and that had a lot to do, I guess, with the major changes to the data structure that I was making. Finding one of these is quite frustrating - sort of like an unforced error in tennis. Just fix them and go on.

Interestingly, there are 4 ways I find bugs:

1. Testing, testing and more testing. This also includes code inspection.
2. Using the program myself for my own genealogical work. I often notice bugs and features to improve this way.
3. Bug reports from users. These are really important to me. I take all reports seriously.
4. Writing the Help File. There’s nothing like documenting something to find it is not working as it should.

Some things are just impossible to fix right now. Loading 100,000 people into Behold takes too long and Behold performs too slowly to be of much use for files of that size. So major concerns like that will have to be improved as part of a larger project (versions 1.1 and 1.2).

Hopefully I can finish up the new Help file without finding too many more problems along the way.