When the code looks right, but the output is wrong

Your code looks right, passes static analysis, and passes tests. But it doesn’t work as expected in production.

One possibility is a bug in your compiler/linker/minimizer/bundler. You can debug this by changing your build settings, changing compilers, or inspecting the output.

For languages like JavaScript, you can inspect and step through the resulting code to see if it looks as you would expect it to. For C/C++, you can use Compiler Explorer to evaluate code snippets and easily compile against a variety of compilers and architectures.

That being said, it’s rare to find bugs in these tools. It happens, but it’s far more likely to be a real bug in your codebase. You might spot it as you start the process of inspecting the output.