heisenbug

plural heisenbugs · alternative Heisenbug

1. computingA software bug which fails to manifest itself or manifests differently during debugging.

   Except for pointer messups in C on my side, the Heisenbugs I've come across were hardly ever caused by _me_.

   1994 January 20, Heinz Wrobel, “'Heisenbugs'”, in comp.programming (Usenet), message-ID <heinz.0i4s@hwg.muc.de>

   2 more examples

   I recently encountered a particularly infuriating Heisenbug. A large program, when given a large input, was just mysteriously dying. Of course, I ran it under the debugger. The mystery deepened: the program returned quietly to the debugger.

   1987 January 4, Don Lindsay, “More Heisen-debugs”, in RISKS Digest, volume 4, number 36

   There are multiple perf related issues like this that are hard to track down. They are borderline heisenbugs that are possibly race conditions, so bisecting doesn't work and even things like enablibg^([sic]) ftrace will make the issue go away (or crash ftrace itself).

   2014 December 8, Vince Weaver, “Re: Linux 3.18 released”, in linux-kernel mailing list, message-ID <alpine.DEB.2.10.1412081331580.28373@pianoman.cluster.toy>

plural Heisenbugs

1. Alternative letter-case form of heisenbug.