Why does rebooting fix everything?

This comes from a long career of software testing where I went through more than a dozen release cycles, noting which testing methods work best.

We’re all familar with the following troubleshooting steps when encountering a problem on our computers or phones:

• Quit and relaunch an app if that’s where the problem lies

• Log out and log back in (on a Mac)

• Reboot

In fact, it’s often the first thing many people try. And for me, I reboot all my devices every morning.

More often than not, the problem goes away. Why is that? Well, a few possible things can explain it:

• Sometimes caches can be cleared on reboot that were causing problems

• Sometimes background processes were running that were affecting an app you were running

• The overall system became constrained for resources and rebooting starts everything from scratch

But I’d offer another explanation: It’s because of how software is tested.

To minimize the number of possible variables that we need to analyze when we encounter a problem, we often end up do…