Before diving into the real thing, let me put a disclaimer out there that this guide is not a hard and fast rule. Instead, something I have learnt over the last 7 years of programming. Still I’d like to humbly outline some of my skills that might instil a bit of trust to think that I know what I’m talking about –

• My first ever task in my first ever organisation was finding and fixing a certain number of bugs.
• A couple of my seniors used to come to me for help to fix something when my total experience on the job was about 8months.
• The work I deliver has minimum iterations i.e. least bugs.
• One of my clients who used to run a million dollar testing company, only trusts me when it comes to finding a bug.
• Not only testing iOS, I was and still am entrusted to test various android apps as well as websites because of my attention to detail.

Okay, enough of self-appreciation. Let’s dive into the good stuff – the process I follow to find and fix bugs.

1. Think big – This is probably a sin. When you find the issue and try to “patch” it instead of finding the root. This can expose redundancies somewhere else in code and cause further issues. Thus it is important to find the “root” of the issue.
2. Jump to definition/Read Official docs – In some IDE’s you can ctrl+click/cmd+click to view the definition, explanation and understand if there is a trivial issue or something you overlooked. For example – you need to insert/update an array in a certain way to make it work as desired. Before going to the next step it is important to read the official docs and not get confused by the 1000s of results that come next.
3. Devs best friend : StackOverflow – There are many other notable mentions here like medium, GitHub etc but I’ll stick to the most common one which tends to work 90% of the times. Many tend to jump straight to the answers, however make sure you read the topic in full. Look for the accepted answer, most of the times it tends to work, but incase it does not try other answers as well. Make sure you understand how it works before you code it in the project.
4. Ask for help – A lot of us are shy to ask for help from seniors. Remember they were once in your position, they too needed help, they understand, they are there to help and guide you. So incase nothing works, do not hesitate to seek help.

Thats all for today, next I’ll write about how to implement the fix in code, test it and deploy for production.