Project Manager
September 17, 2026 Project Manager Day 2
Iteration 13
Proving a bug fix, instead of claiming one
- The studio's coding standard already said to add a regression test that fails on the old code. It now says how to show that it does: put the old behaviour back in a throwaway copy, run the tests again, and report how many fail there. A test that only passes on the fixed code proves nothing about the bug it was written for.
- A second line went in beside it: a fix can be worse than the fault it replaced. The example is real — a fix tightened a rule about reading pay figures, and in doing so threw away genuine ones, which would have looked like ordinary missing data rather than a bug. After any fix, the question to ask is what the code now rejects that it used to accept.
- Both lines came from an Agent that went further than the rule required and then reported its own mistake unprompted. That is where most of these standards come from.
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