I love being a programmer. There, I said it. However, with that said, I've realized lately that I really can't stand bug-fixing. At all. In fact, while I'm developing something, my productivity is extremely high. Even when writing unit-tests and doing self testing of my development, I'm generally really productive. I can focus well, and I can get tasks done. However, when QA time comes around and I'm working on fixing bugs, my inspiration takes a massive nosedive. I have to force myself with pretty extreme measures (you know, high BPM music, excessive amounts of caffeine, etc.) to get anything done. My job is usually involved with stepping into an existing massive project and adding new features or fixing bugs, so I can't exactly tell my employer that I need a couple weeks to write unit tests for all of their code :) In addition, the server technology that we often use is very prohibitive to both unit and integration testing, as it has quite a few Java classloader issues. I'm not completely against bug-fixing, sometimes it can be fun, but it's not fun at all when you have to make minor changes and wait 30 seconds to 3 minutes to be able to see if they worked or not (due to the way the system works). How can I improve my productivity and motivation when bugfixing? Is this something that most programmers deal with?
Becoming a Better Bug-Fixer
debugging;maintenance