So what is the takeaway here? If you only remember one thing, remember this. Once the users of your system lose faith in the abilities and potential of that system due to bugs, that confidence is almost impossible to regain. Even if you resurrect your system from the ashes, after it was laid low by bugs and other issues, to produce a flawless product, your users will not be easily swayed. This is because in their mind, the system is buggy.

I once had to take over a system partially developed by a senior developer who was leaving the company. She had an excellent specification and a well presented prototype shown to the customer. The only problem was that she left the company shortly after the system's phase one was implemented. When the bugs came popping up, the client naturally asked for her assistance.

Telling the client that the developer (who had been solely responsible for building a relationship with the client) had left the company did not bode well to instill a sense of confidence. Having a single developer involved was the first mistake of this particular project anyway.

Secondly, phase two was about to be developed by yours truly, who was also the only developer assigned to this client. This had to be done while building on top of the buggy phase one. So, I was fixing bugs while developing new features for the system. Luckily this time round, I had a fantastic project manager called Rory Shelton as my wingman. Together, we were dumped in the deep end and Rory did a fantastic job managing the client's expectations while being totally transparent with the client regarding the challenges we were facing.

The users were unfortunately already disillusioned with the provided system and didn't trust the software. This trust was never fully regained. If we had IntelliTrace and historical debugging back in 2007, I definitely would have been able to track down the issues in a code base that was unfamiliar to me.

Always debug your software. When you find no more bugs, debug it again. Then give the system to my mom (love you mom). You, as the developer of that system, know which buttons to click on and what data to enter, and in which order things need to happen. My mom doesn't and I can assure you that a user unfamiliar with a system can break it quicker than you can brew a fresh cup of coffee.

Visual Studio provides developers with a very powerful and feature rich set of debugging tools. Use them.