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When debugging a system is there any generally favored approach to which bugs to start with? Is it the easiest to fix, the hardest or the "most important" (whatever that means)?

Personally, I always do the easy ones first on the grounds that in the past I have discovered that they sometimes have knock-on effects, and fixing them can get rid of others. Or conversely, trivial bugs can mask more serious ones.

Dirk Bruere
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  • Fix first the bugs which are most valuable to fix first. As a developer you probably cannot define the value of a bug fix, you need to consult with a customer or product owner. – APC Nov 14 '15 at 10:15

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Usually bugs are prioritised by importance with importance being defined by the business added value after fixing this bug. There are different systems of prioritizing bugs, often developers score each bug on severity and priority. It is important to use both metrics as some severe bugs (crashing of application) may not actually have an high priority, for example if they occur in an experimental module of your product. This has been extensively discussed in the past, see this post for a more in detail discussion: How to prioritize bugs?

Community
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Alex
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  • Thanks. My interest lies in firmware in an R&D setting in a small company, so basically I get to do the entire chunk of s/w, and also decide when it should be released to production. If we get a bug report from a customer that generally gets fixed as a one-off. However, on the project I am now working on I maybe have a dozen or more known minor bugs. – Dirk Bruere Nov 13 '15 at 11:55