Debugging Techniques

Being able to use debugging tools is only part of the debugging battle. Becoming an effective debugger is a holistic, never-ending process. I have been debugging software for over twenty years, and I am still learning new ways of producing (and finding) program errors. Here are some things I have learned over the years.

One of the most important things to remember is that bugs are just errors. They are mistakes that people, either you or others, have made. They are not things that randomly crawl into your code. Some programmers don’t call bugs bugs but instead use the more accurate (but less fun) term defect to emphasize that bugs are just mistakes. Knowing that a bug can be tracked down to a mistake that has been made ...

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