Chapter 11. Quality Assurance and Debugging

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Obviously, if you could ensure quality there would be no bugs to remove. But it isn't that easy. What constitutes a "bug" is arguably anything from an onscreen typo to code that causes the user 's machine to crash. A range of things can certainly go wrong and, in a perfect world, we would avoid all of them. I've heard people say, "All software has bugs," as if this is supposed to placate a client stuck with a show-stopper bug in a project. In fact, it's possible to build an application free of critical bugs . This chapter gives you philosophical approaches as well as practical tools so that you can make your application as bug free as possible.

This chapter covers debugging in a sort of chronological order: how to evaluate the seriousness of your bugs, ways to avoid bugs in the first place, and ways to actually squash bugs.

Specifically, this chapter covers the following topics:

• Techniques to manage your bugs so that you can address them systematically

• How to build systems that reduce or eliminate the chance for bugs

• Practical methods to hunt down and resolve bugs, including the use of the Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Debugger panel

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