Phil Wallach

Why do developers make mistakes?

1. Ignorance

2. Stress

3. Boredom

4. Human frailties

Categories of error

“We can either categorize based on root cause in the code (e.g., null pointer dereference, failure to unlock after acquiring a lock, buffer overrun, etc.) or based on a higher level reason for the mistake (e.g., improper error handling, typo, copy and paste, etc.) … we choose the latter …”

1. Ignorance

2. Copy and paste

3. Error handling

4. Off by ones

5. Typos

The article then goes on to make a case for static code analysis tools.

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