The Debugging Mind-Set
As we’ve already seen, debugging is first and foremost a mental activity. A healthy debugging mind-set can be a difficult balance to strike. Occasionally, it can feel as though you’ve joined Alice Through the Looking-Glass [Car71]:
- Alice:
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There’s no use trying, one can’t believe impossible things.
- White Queen:
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I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for a half hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Taken naïvely, the “no broken windows” approach could be interpreted to mean that only perfection will do. But as anyone who’s ever worked on a nontrivial software project knows, bugs are inevitable. No matter how hard we try, some ...
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