Ghost in the Code: When Bugs Defy Logic, How Do Teams Respond? 👻

Hans A., Front-End Developer |

October 29, 2024

Do you know what a bug is? It’s an error or flaw in software that causes it to behave unexpectedly. But did you know that there are intermittent bugs or what I call “ghost bugs”? According to Medium[1], they appear unpredictable, making them hard to reproduce and, consequently, challenging to fix.

Battling Ghost Bugs in the Final Hour

The worst part of being a developer is when our app breaks right before production, and we have no idea why. As a front-end developer, I know how tricky it can be to build a complex user interface (UI). Everything worked fine during development, but after user testing, we encountered a ghost bug. Out of nowhere, our onboarding page flickered under conditions we hadn’t seen before. It didn’t happen in testing or staging, but in production, the bug appeared randomly with no clear error messages. I used debugging tools, checked logs, and combed through the code, but nothing worked. No matter what I did, I couldn’t reproduce the issue on my local machine or in our staging environment.

When the Code Looks Fine, But Something’s Broken

It’s easy to feel alone when dealing with ghost bugs, but collaboration is the key to solving these problems. We gathered everyone—developers, editors, marketers, UI/UX designers, and project managers to figure out when and how the bug happened. By sharing different views, we found that the bug occurred when a user with an existing account logged in, causing the app to sometimes flicker back to the onboarding page. However, fixing it wasn’t easy because the bug doesn’t always show up when we expect it, making it hard to track. Hours could go by without a sign, and then, out of nowhere, it would reappear.

Debugging Ghost Bugs: A Detective’s Mindset

Debugging ghost bugs often feels like detective work, and it requires more than just coding skills. It takes patience, thinking outside the box, and a team-focused mindset. Sometimes, I need to step back and ask my team,

“What else could be causing this?”
“Could it be a design issue?”
“Maybe something in the backend?”

It’s in these moments of shared problem-solving that the pieces finally come together, and the ghost bug gets caught.

Teamwork Makes the Bugs Disappear

In the end, ghost bugs show just how crucial communication is in development. No matter how challenging the issue is, working with a team to brainstorm ideas makes a big difference. By collaborating and sharing insights, I’ve seen firsthand how we uncover solutions that might have been missed individually, gradually eliminating those tricky bugs one step at a time.

Reference:

https://medium.com/@case_lab/identifying-and-reproducing-intermittent-bugs-efce4ffb5af3#:~:text=Intermittent%20bugs,%20also%20known%20as%20heisenbugs,%20are%20defects%20that%20do