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Discussion on: What's the longest you've ever spent debugging a single bug?

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Mélanie Lelaure

Unfortunately, I spend once, 3 months on a single bug. It was very long and I got desperate about it.

It was with a teleoperation application with a universal robot. The robot demo worked correctly in our office but not when the commercial did the demo at UR. For some reason, one demo was working, not the other we didn't seem to have any communication between the robots. Well, the second demo was working for 2 to 3 minutes and then both robots stopped, and stay blocked. It took a very long time to solve this, because we didn't have the setup to reproduce the bug in our office and I was not in a good health condition too.

Finally, the problem was from our robot dll library. They were an update, I was not aware of, between both demos. A colleague decided that a division by 2, which was not documented, was not "supposed" to be necessary. So he had removed it from the real-time library without further notice and pushed it in production. The result was that communication between both robots was not running at the correct speed. It was 2 times slower, therefore the teleoperation was not possible. Several months later, the bug is still in production, because "it was not the problem". Well it solves mine actually and I had figures to prove it.

This happened some time ago, I am not in this company anymore.