Write comprehensive tests that cover edge cases and platform-specific scenarios to uncover underlying implementation issues rather than masking them with workarounds. When encountering failures, investigate the root cause through targeted testing before implementing fallback mechanisms. For platform-specific issues, add integration tests that run on the affected platforms: ```cpp // Instead of adding fallbacks like: if (!IsReadableFile(*result)) { // fallback logic } // Add platform-specific integration tests to investigate the root cause ``` For complex functionality, test edge cases systematically: ```java // Test comprehensive scenarios like: // * UTF-16 strings with non-ASCII BMP characters // * UTF-16 strings with surrogate pairs // * Latin1-hack strings with invalid UTF-8 // * Unpaired surrogates in various positions ``` This approach often reveals bugs in existing implementations that would otherwise remain hidden. As noted in one review: "This was both a nightmare and super helpful as the previous implementation had a number of bugs." Comprehensive testing serves as both quality assurance and debugging tool, helping teams understand the true behavior of their code rather than working around symptoms.