Bug Fixing

Defect resolution is a harsh reality of software engineering. It's considered low-end, unglamorous drudgery. Most software engineers would rather be working on new features than combing through stack traces, trying to solve murky race conditions.

Fortunately, we thrive on it. We've done professional bug fixing for several years. We have the necessary experience and persistence to quickly figure out how to reproduce problems, get to the root cause, then develop and deploy a fix (with all due care to minimize regression risk). One of our partners actually prefers this to writing new features.

Languages and Systems

We work primarily in C and Perl. We have some experience with Visual Basic, so we also feel comfortable debugging in that language. Assembly code is also OK (though instruction sets differ). If your system is in other languages (like Java) then you're probably better off going to someone else for debugging assistance.

Linux application and kernel/driver debugging is also an area in which we can offer assistance. There's no problem poking through oops traces and interrupt service routines.

For Windows systems, we can do some tricks with monitoring utilities to ferret out buggy or suboptimal behavior, even for applications for which you haven't the source code. However, for detailed source-level debugging of non-VB Windows applications, and any debugging of Windows drivers, you'll be better off with someone else.

We're proficient in debugging for embedded systems; it's actually probably where we're most cost-effective.

Prior Projects

• Debugging platform-independent switch/router software, driving the entire process from customer bug report through fix development and customer fix deployment.
• Debugging token-ring switch software, mostly implementing fixes needed to make the system more robust in "dirty" networks.
• Fixed 3 personally-affecting bugs in MythTV.
• Got Asterisk's ALSA-soundcard PBX channel working.