Silent failures

Bugs can occur with no errors, warnings, or feedback. When you press a button and nothing happens. No error dialog. No crash. No log written.

If it’s your code, it still may not be immediately obvious what is going on. You don’t litter the “happy path” with log messages because most of the time they aren’t useful and may cost you.

When you are faced with these silent failures, you have some options. Step through the code with a debugger. Add some breadcrumbs. Add a test to cover the case. Consider adding a feedback feature so users can share when they occur.

Do you have any interesting silent failure stories?