Jim Panttaja

We often watch people concentrating their debugging or problem solving in one area. It is the old joke depicted in the image below. You walk up to someone looking for their key. After helping them for awhile, you start asking a few questions - finally asking  how they lost the key, or where they lost the key. The answer is “over there”. You then ask the obvious question - “If you dropped it over there, why are you looking for it here?”. They answer “Because the light is better”.

Sometimes you are looking at one piece of your code, or your process, because you know that part best - not because it is the likely source (no pun intended) of the problem. You need to look other places. Maybe look at the place you understand the least. Maybe look at the piece of code that you hate to look in (maybe there is a reason you don’t like to go there). Maybe you should spawn some agents.

[The cartoons were done for us several years ago by Marc Schmid. His website is www.cartooncity.net ]