How to recover from finite-state-machine breakdown?
- by Earl Grey
My question may seems very scientific but I think it's a common problem and seasoned developers and programmers hopefully will have some advice to avoid the problem I mention in title. Btw., what I describe bellow is a real problem I am trying to proactively solve in my iOS project, I want to avoid it at all cost.
By finite state machine I mean this
I have a UI with a few buttons, several session states relevant to that UI and what this UI represents, I have some data which values are partly displayed in the UI, I receive and handle some external triggers (represented by callbacks from sensors).
I made state diagrams to better map the relevant scenarios that are desirable and alowable in that UI and application.
As I slowly implement the code, the app starts to behave more and more like it should. However, I am not very confident that it is robust enough.
My doubts come from watching my own thinking and implementation process as it goes. I was confident that I had everything covered, but it was enough to make a few brute tests in the UI and I quickly realized that there are still gaps in the behavior ..I patched them.
However, as each component depends and behaves based on input from some other component, a certain input from user or some external source trigers a chain of events, state changes..etc.
I have several components and each behave like this
Trigger received on input - trigger and its sender analyzed - output something (a message, a state change) based on analysis
The problem is, this is not completely selfcontained, and my components (a database item, a session state, some button's state)...COULD be changed, influenced, deleted, or otherwise modified, outside the scope of the event-chain or desirable scenario. (phone crashes, battery is empty phone turn of suddenly)
This will introduce a nonvalid situation into the system, from which the system potentially COULD NOT BE ABLE to recover.
I see this (althought people do not realize this is the problem) in many of my competitors apps that are on apple store, customers write things like this
"I added three documents, and after going there and there, i cannot open them, even if a see them." or "I recorded videos everyday, but after recording a too log video, I cannot turn of captions on them.., and the button for captions doesn't work"..
These are just shortened examples, customers often describe it in more detail..from the descriptions and behavior described in them, I assume that the particular app has a FSM breakdown.
So the ultimate question is how can I avoid this, and how to protect the system from blocking itself?
EDIT I am talking in the context of one viewcontroller's view on the phone, I mean one part of the application. I Understand the MVC pattern, I have separate modules for distinct functionality..everything I describe is relevant to one canvas on the UI.
