6 stages of debugging: 6. How did that ever work?

You were sure there was no bug. Then you found it. You understand it, and inspect the code once more. You see it differently now.

Your next thought is, “How did that ever work?”

It was broken from the start! Or was it? Context is important here, and perhaps the code worked fine in the past, with older dependencies, previous versions of APIs, or even before a particular year. Like the year 2000.

Maybe it worked fine on your hardware or with your configuration. Sometimes the code was simply never executed before. It happens!

“How did that ever work?” is the next layer of understanding and learning. Finding the answer will help you with future debugging.