9. Debugging, Testing, and Profiling
Writing programs is a mixture of art, craft, and science, and because it is done by humans, mistakes are made. Fortunately, there are techniques we can use to help avoid problems in the first place, and techniques for identifying and fixing mistakes when they become apparent.
Mistakes fall into several categories. The quickest to reveal themselves and the easiest to fix are syntax errors, since these are usually due to typos. More challenging are logical errors—with these, the program runs, but some aspect of its behavior is not what we intended or expected. Many errors of this kind can be prevented from happening by using TDD (Test Driven Development), where when ...
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