Comment by hinkley

You can do both.

The noise is often what hides the bug in the first place. Aim for more straightforward code and the bug will often surface.

For a while when Node was switching to async from promise chains, people would bring me code or tests that were misfiring and they couldn’t tell why. Often it was because of either a bug in the promise chaining or someone tried to graft async code into the chain and it was an impedance mismatch.

I would start them by asking them to make the function fully async and then come back. About half the time the code just fixed itself. Because the intention of the code was correct, but there was some subtle bookkeeping or concurrency issue that was obfuscated. About a quarter of the time the bug popped out and the dev fixed it. And about a quarter of the time there was a legitimate bug that had been sleeping. The function was fine ones own, but something it called was broken.

There are a lot of situations like that out there. The code distracts from the real problem, but just fixing the “real problem” is a disservice because another real problem will happen later. Make the change easy. That’s always the middle of the solution.