A lot of bugs are in some way related to state. So that is what we will be talking about today. We will start off with a quote from Einstein: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. ” Code should be consistent, calling the same function with the same input should return the same result during the whole life cycle of the object. Insanity and bugs will follow if this rule is violated. This sounds logical, but in practise it is quite easy to violate this principle. The main cause of this, is object state. This state is used in a lot of functions, and can thus affect the behaviour of our program at runtime. This principle can be even be seen in the most basic of examples (imagine the impact on a more complicated class...). Given the following class:

public class Person {
    private String name;
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
}

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