Understanding Types of Software Bugs
Explore the various types of software bugs such as arithmetic errors like division by zero and overflow, logical mistakes affecting program logic, and syntax errors that prevent code execution. This lesson helps you understand how these bugs appear and how to identify and manage them effectively in your code.
Types of bugs
There are many different ways we can classify bugs. Here, we will look at some common types, see what they are, and see what they can look like.
Arithmetic bugs
Arithmetic bugs, as the name suggests, have to do with arithmetic operations. There are a few things we should look out for, as outlined below.
Division by zero
One thing to look out for is division by zero. This is not only related to computers—we can also never perform a division operation where the divisor is zero. In mathematics, dividing by zero has no meaning, because if we do 6 / 2, we will get 3. If we multiply 3 and 2, we’ll get 6 back. But if we take 6 / 0, there is no number we can multiply by zero to get back to 6.
This might seem simple enough, but sometimes, it happens anyway, especially when we’re working with variables. Let’s assume that we have two variables that get their value somewhere in our application, like this:
Later on in the program, we perform some calculations, maybe with some other variables, and it might look like this:
y = y – current_temperature
If the current_temperature variable now has the same value as y, which is 14 in our case, we’ll store the result, 0, back in y. If we then did something like this, our application would crash:
result = x / y
The reason for this is that we are dividing by zero. It ...