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6 stages of debugging: 2. That doesn't happen on my machine

You’ve accepted that the bug report really happened. You read the reproduction steps and followed them.

It didn’t happen for you. Case-closed, right? Maybe it was a one-off? Maybe someone else has fixed it since then? Maybe.

Did you follow all the steps? Tried several times?

If it still isn’t happening, you have something new to do: figure out what is different with your machine.

Developer machines are often quite different, you might have special tools, plugins, extensions, and development settings. You’ll want to compare and contrast environments, accounts, software versions, and more. You might end up with a second check-out of the code, or doing a rebuild from scratch.

It will be a process of elimination to narrow down what the key difference is. Once you find it, it’s often related to the bug in question. So you’ll have some strong clues when it comes to investigating why it’s happening.

Stage 2 of 6 complete!

- Karl

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