How to solve REALLY difficult bugs/technical issues

SethH

SethH

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Feb 4, 2010
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I know this may not be the best place to ask, but I figure that there's a decent number of developers on here as well as others like myself who manage outsourced teams.

I'm looking for ideas on suggestions on what you guys do when you run into a bug or problem that's way above your head and you cannot solve it. I'm not talking the kind of things where you can search on Google and Stackoverflow and find a solution or hire some random coder off an outsourcing site to fix it for you, but something where there truly isn't any easily available answer.

Currently it's exactly the situation I'm facing, without outing myself too badly I'll try and explain it:

A part of my project involved the development of a universal driver, lets say for Printers. When I install this driver via Windows Device Manager, it works beautifully, every single time. However, when I try to install it through my own software program, or even through the Windows Driver Package Installer, it LOOKS like it works, prompts for the security alert on the code signing certificate, device manager identifies the right device, installs the driver, and claims its working properly... the only catch... it doesn't actually Work, ie. it won't print. The only notable difference in working vs non working I can see if when I do a manual install and it works, when I later go to uninstall the driver, it forces me to restart my computer to remove it, while when my automatic non-working install that looks right happens, itll uninstall without any prompt about needing to restart. The same is true for any printer and any windows version.

TLDR version: for some reason, my driver only works when its installed manually, even though Windows thinks it likes the driver when its done automatically
Click to expand...
Normally I'd just make a new Odesk/Elance posting to fix, ask a question on a coding forum, or have a different one of my developers look at it. In this case however, I've already had 3 excellent developers all completely baffled. I'm told Stackoverflow won't even allow a question like mine as it'd involve pasting hundreds or more lines of code and is a device specific thing. I'm also hesitant to publicly post my code anywhere as I'm doing something that's genuinely unique and I really don't want competitors figuring it out.

What do/would you do in a situation like this? Is there some sort of private place where I can crowdsource or put a bounty on a fix? This issue is way above the level of Odesk/Freelancer/Elance. Is there somewhere I'm missing you can go to find highly specialized developers.
 


Have you tried an approach where you

1) Uninstall the driver, verify it's completely gone/

2) Install a tool that shows all differences in the registry, file system, etc. (TrackWinstall, Systracer, or similar).

3) Create a system restore point, then Run the "before" scan.

4) Manually install the driver, in the way that you said made it work, run "after" scan with the tool from #2.

5) Go back to the restore point, and run the automatic installer

6) Run the tool again to see differences.

7) Compare the two and see what happened differently in the manual install.

As for finding the type of expertise you're looking for, one option would be to go troll around LinkedIn. Searching for ""windows driver developer" yielded some promising results for me. Of course, then you need to get them interested in helping.
 
rish3 said:
Have you tried an approach where you

1) Uninstall the driver, verify it's completely gone/

2) Install a tool that shows all differences in the registry, file system, etc. (TrackWinstall, Systracer, or similar).

3) Create a system restore point, then Run the "before" scan.

4) Manually install the driver, in the way that you said made it work, run "after" scan with the tool from #2.

5) Go back to the restore point, and run the automatic installer

6) Run the tool again to see differences.

7) Compare the two and see what happened differently in the manual install.

As for finding the type of expertise you're looking for, one option would be to go troll around LinkedIn. Searching for ""windows driver developer" yielded some promising results for me. Of course, then you need to get them interested in helping.
Click to expand...

Using a Virtual Machine would make this process a lot simpler (not knocking on your advice, it's good). That way you can just take VM snapshots instead of doing restore points.
 
rish3 said:
Have you tried an approach where you

1) Uninstall the driver, verify it's completely gone/

2) Install a tool that shows all differences in the registry, file system, etc. (TrackWinstall, Systracer, or similar).

3) Create a system restore point, then Run the "before" scan.

4) Manually install the driver, in the way that you said made it work, run "after" scan with the tool from #2.

5) Go back to the restore point, and run the automatic installer

6) Run the tool again to see differences.

7) Compare the two and see what happened differently in the manual install.

As for finding the type of expertise you're looking for, one option would be to go troll around LinkedIn. Searching for ""windows driver developer" yielded some promising results for me. Of course, then you need to get them interested in helping.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the detailed response. I hadn't thought of using LinkedIn as a place to recruit developers, but I'll certainly keep it in mind. Appreciate your debugging advice. My developers ended up finally getting it fixed this morning after days of painful trial and error testing. Turned out that the big brand driver we'd used in our template off of actually had the bug in it, we swapped to basing ours off a different brand's and suddenly it all started working.
 
Well now all the driver developers come out of the woodwork. Apparently our mistake was assuming an official published Google driver would be bug free. I don't know how you guys handle it, this was 3 days of solid torture. Especially since my developers all love to do their testing remotely on my machines rather than their own, in fact, maybe that's the part I should have made a thread about.
 
My buddy is working for Intel as a driver dev. If still relevant, drop me PM and i'll ask him if he might help.


:cool:
 
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