Peter Marklund's Home

I've been deploying a couple of Rails applications for a client lately and things have been running surprisingly smoothly and there have hardly been any issues at all. In one of the more complex applications though a few bugs slipped through my testing net and were caught by the excellent Exception Notifier plugin by Jamis Buck. Now, the question is, how do we typically deal with bugs as programmers? If the bug is in production we rush to fix it, push the fix out, and hope not too many people noticed it, and then try to forget about the whole thing. What we should be doing though is ask ourselves why the bug occured in the first place, how we can categorize the bug, and what kind of process and/or tests can we put in place to prevent similar kind of bugs from happening in the future. Bug tracking is a gold mine for figuring out how we can raise the quality of our software and reduce the bug rate in the future. This may be common sense, but how many of us actually use this opportunity?