Debugging

Acknowledgments

This book was born in 1981 when a group of test technicians at Gould asked me if I could write a document on how to troubleshoot our hardware products. I was at a loss—the products were boards with hundreds of chips on them, several microprocessors, and numerous communications buses. I knew there was no magical recipe; they would just have to learn how to debug things. I discussed this with Mike Bromberg, a long time mentor of mine, and we decided the least we could do was write up some general rules of debugging. The Ten Debugging Commandments were the result, a single sheet of brief rules for debugging which quickly appeared on the wall above the test benches. Over the years, this list was compressed by one rule and generalized ...