Tag: how-to

How I find the source of bugs

You know the situation: a user calls or emails you to tell you your program has a problem. Here I illustrate how I find the source of the problem

You know the situation: a user calls or emails you to tell you your program has a problem. When you are lucky he lists some steps he believe he did to reproduce the behaviour. When you are really lucky those steps are the right ones.
In some cases you even got a stacktrace on the logs. High fives all around. You follow the steps the problem shows and you get the exact position in the code where things get wrong. Now is a great time to write a test which executes the steps and shows the bug. If the bug isn’t data dependent you normally can nail it with your test. If it is dependent on the data in the production system you have to find the minimal set of data constraints which causes the problem. The test fails, fixing it should make it green and fix the problem. Done.
But there are cases where the problem is caused not in the last action but sometime before. If the data does not reflect that the problem is buried in layers between like caches, in memory structures or the particular state the system is in.
Here knowledge of the frameworks used or the system in question helps you to trace back the flow of the state and data coming to the position of the stack trace.
Sometimes the steps do not reproduce the behaviour. But most of the time the steps are an indicator for how to reproduce the problem. The stack trace should give you enough information. If it doesn’t, take a look in your log. If this also does not show enough info to find the steps you should improve your log around the position of the strack trace. Wait for the next instance or try your own luck and then you should have enough information to find the real problem.
But what if you have no stack trace? No position to start your hunt? No steps to reproduce? Just a message like: after some days I got an empty transmission happening every minute. After some days. No stack trace. No user actions. Just a log message that says: starting transmission. No error. No further info.
You got nothing. Almost. You got a message with three bits of info: transmission, every minute and empty.
I start with transmission. Where does the system transmit data. Good for the architecture but bad for tracing the transmission is decoupled from the rest of the system by using a message bus. Next.
Every minute. How does the system normally start recurring processes? By quartz, a scheduler for Java. Looking at the configuration of the live system no process is nearly triggered every minute. There must be another place. Searching the code and the log another message indicates a running process: a watchdog. This watchdog puts a message on the bus if it detects a problem. Which is then send by the transmission process. Bingo. But why is it empty?
Now the knowledge about the facilities the system uses comes into play: UMTS. Sometimes the transmission rate is so low that the connection does not transfer any packages. The receiving side records a transmission but gets no data.
Most of the time the problem can be found in your own code but all code has bugs. If you assume after looking at your code that the frameworks you use have a bug. Search the bug database of the framework hopefully it is found there and already fixed.

Translating strings in internationalized applications

Internationalization (“i18n”) and localization (“l10n”) of software is a complex topic with many facets. One aspect of internationalization is the translation of strings in programs into different languages.

Here’s an example of how not to do it (assuming t is a translation lookup function):

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(t("User "));
sb.append(user.name());
sb.append(t(" logged in "));
sb.append(minutes);
sb.append(" ");
if (minutes == 1) {
    sb.append(t("minute"));
} else {
    sb.append(t("minutes"));
}
sb.append(t(" ago."));
return sb.toString();

Translatable strings and concatenation don’t mix well, be it via StringBuilder, the plus operator or in template files like JSPs. Different languages have different sentence structures. You can’t know in advance in which order the parts must appear in the translated text. So the most basic rule is: never construct sentences programmatically from sentence fragments if they are intended for translation.

Here’s a slightly better variant:

if (minutes == 1) {
    return t("User {0} logged in {1} minute ago.", user.name(), minutes);
}
return t("User {0} logged in {1} minutes ago.", user.name(), minutes);

I18n frameworks always offer the possibility to pass arguments to the translation lookup function. This way translators can freely choose the positions of these arguments via placeholders in the translated string.

However, not all languages have pluralization rules similar to English, where you have to handle only two cases (one and zero/many). For example, Russian and Polish use different forms of nouns with different numerals higher than one. Here’s an extensive table listing the plural rules for different languages: The rules are classified into these categories: “one”, “two”, “few”, “many”, “other”. Good i18n frameworks provide translation lookup functions where you can pass the count as an additional argument. The framework then dispatches to different translation keys, depending on the count and the target language:

user.login.minutes.one=...
user.login.minutes.two=...
user.login.minutes.many=...
user.login.minutes.other=...

There are other traps that you have to watch out for, e.g.

  • different punctuation marks: you can’t simply assume that you can convert any translated text into a label by appending “:” to it, or that you can convert any translated text into a quotation by surrounding it with ” and “.
  • gender rules, which can be handled similarly to the pluralization rules

Conclusion

This article gave a small glimpse into the topic of internationalization, to help avoid the most basic mistakes. Check out the documentation of your internationalization framework to see what it can offer.