What Is Troubleshooting?

We hear about troubleshooting all the time. It conjures the image of a brainy technician, her utility belt bristling with tools, head stuck inside a rocket engine, muttering about how the condensers on the Apollo-96 tend to get "a little sticky" in the asteroid belt. One answer to the question "What is troubleshooting?" is simply "the art of detecting, diagnosing, and repairing problems." In our case, of course, we're concerned with problems that might appear during the operation of a piece of software.

This diagnostic flavor of troubleshooting is extremely important. This chapter introduces you to some of the broader systematic problems that can occur in a FileMaker system. We explain how to spot these and fix them, and we discuss some useful debugging tools that the FileMaker product offers you.

We're also going to try to sell you on a broader interpretation of the idea of troubleshooting. The problem that's easiest to fix, of course, is the problem that never happens. So in addition to reactive troubleshooting ”the art of finding and fixing problems after they happen ”we're also going to spend some time talking about proactive troubleshooting. To us, this means designing systems that are simply less error-prone , and designing them in such a way that any errors that do appear are caught and handled in a systematic way. The better you become at this kind of proactive troubleshooting, the less often and less severely your reactive skills are likely to be tested .