Debug It!

Put It in Action

• Detect bugs as early as possible, and fix them as soon as they come to light.

• Act as though bug-free software was an attainable goal, but temper perfectionism with pragmatism.

• If you find yourself faced with a poor quality codebase, do the following:

  • Recognize there is no silver bullet.

  • Make sure that the basics are in place first.

  • Separate clean code from unclean, and keep it clean.

  • Use bug triage to keep on top of your bug database.

  • Incrementally clean up bad code by adding tests and refactoring.

Footnotes

[21]	First popularized in the context of software by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer [HT00].
[22]	We’ll cover these in detail in Chapter 9, ​The Ideal Debugging Environment​.
[23]