Week 2: Stop Debugging. Start Reviewing.

A customer was missing links in their generated reports. Links they were certain were configured correctly. No error message. No exception in the log. The report rendered fine. Just without those links.

Classic Polarion debugging territory: the Velocity widget does its job silently, the Java service layer doesn't tell you what it skipped, and the customer has no way to trace what happened. Normally this means opening the widget, reading through the logic, forming a hypothesis, adding a log statement, redeploying, testing. Forty-five minutes if you know the code. More if it's been a while.

This week I want to walk through exactly this kind of ticket: how I'd handle it differently, what that looks like in practice, and what happens to the code after the fix.

Table of Contents

• Pattern 1: You're the Reviewer Now
• Walking Through a Real Ticket
  • Step 1: Understand what's there before touching anything
  • Step 2: Review the logging situation in Java
  • Step 3: Review the Velocity widget output
• Pattern 2: Cleanup Passes
  • Pass 1: Structure
  • Pass 2: Logging
  • Pass 3: Documentation
  • Pass 4: Validation
• When to Stop and Take Over
• This Week's Checklist
• Coming Up

Pattern 1: You're the Reviewer Now

There's a habit most developers have that I'm slowly unlearning: when a bug shows up, the instinct is to immediately dive in yourself. Open the file, read the stack trace, start forming hypotheses. That's the muscle memory.