Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

Narrowing Down the Problem

When someone tells me about a problem—especially one that seems unlikely—my first instinct is to narrow down the situations in which the problem happens. If someone says "the system isn't saving orders," I want to know if it can save any orders at all. If it can save some, what are the circumstances in which it works and in which it fails. The larger the sys tem is, the more important it is to narrow down a problem before you start looking at individual components.

Try to eliminate as many variables as possible. If you're debugging a Web application, does the error happen under all browsers? If you're accessing a particular application server from a Web application, can you also duplicate the error by using a test program ...