Heisenbug

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What Does Heisenbug Mean?

Heisenbug is a software bug that changes or alters its behavior when it’s being observed or undergoes isolation. Heisenbug can refer to any software bug with unusual behavior, particularly when its operation appears to disappear or change when it is being studied or worked on by a software program or debugger application.

Techopedia Explains Heisenbug

The name of this bug is derived from a quantum physics law conceived by Werner Heisenberg, who found that human observation can have an effect on small particles, which can make their behavior seem unpredictable and studying them difficult. Heisenbugs are known to display very unpredictable behavior. Any attempt to debug or recreate a Heisenbug can make the bug disappear. Typically, a Heisenbug occurs as a result of uninitialized code in memory, where each function related with that value might act unusually.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.