“Insidious bug” is a term that I use to refers to software defects that are invisible to the end user, but are quietly causing problems behind the scenes.  These errors often occur when a normal bug was either trapped and ignored, or fixed by treating the symptom and not the root cause.  This is also known as bug masking.  I refer to them as insidious when the masked bug is additionally corrupting data.

In my opinion this the most severe type of software bug – far worse than a fatal crash. Users may put in countless hours, weeks, months of data entry before a problem with the data is discovered.  Discovering the cause of insidious bugs can be extremely difficult because there are no indications that the code is failing.  In some cases data may not be recoverable because it was never saved correctly.  Corrupt data can directly cause any number of problems including financial loss, lawsuits, etc.

Keep reading for my personal thoughts on causes and solutions…

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