What are effective ways to log and track programming mistakes?

Question

On occasion I've heard people discuss the benefits of keeping track of programming mistakes, if for no other reason than it increases awareness of common errors. I've started to keep a list of bugs that I find in my code, along with what could have led to them. The main question I have is this:

• What information related to my mistakes should I be keeping track of so that I can improve as a programmer?

And a couple other questions related to this:

• How do I use this information once I start logging my mistakes?
• Is tracking mistakes truly beneficial?

Answer 1

This is only useful if you are actually vigilant with tracking and reviewing. When I was working on a team, no matter how much documented that for example our servers in the production environment were natted and would not be able to resolve their own domain names or public IP addresses, every 6 months, I'd get a call at 4 AM from the deployment team or dev team that a new developer was responsible for, and they either forgot or were unaware.

I remember a particular engineer who was repsonsible for deploying and he had paper checklists, we built him deployment tools that forced him to record his checklist, yet he would always forgot to set the connection string (resulting in the 4 am phone call). Point is it's only worth it if your going to use it vigilantly.

I've found the best way to use this is by implementing your rules into a code analyzer like fxcop.

Answer 2

I think what is more useful than keeping a log of individual mistakes is making sure you come away with a real understanding of why it was a mistake in the first place. Most mistakes stem from a lack of understanding about one thing or another, correct that understanding and you eliminate an entire set of potential mistakes in the future. If I would log anything it would be what I learned from the experience that I didn't know before, not the specifics of the mistake that was made which is likely to be of limited usefulness when you look back at it later.