Chapter 23. Debugging

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Contents

  • Overview of Debugging Issues page 535

  • Finding a Defect page 540

  • Fixing a Defect page 550

  • Psychological Considerations in Debugging page 554

  • Debugging Tools Obvious and Not-So-Obvious page 556

Related Topics

  • The software-quality landscape: Chapter 20

  • Developer testing: Chapter 22

  • Refactoring: Chapter 24

Debugging is the process of identifying the root cause of an error and correcting it. It contrasts with testing, which is the process of detecting the error initially. On some projects, debugging occupies as much as 50 percent of the total development time. For many programmers, debugging is the hardest part of programming.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Brian W. Kernighan

Debugging doesn't have to be the hardest part. If you follow the advice in this book, you'll have fewer errors to debug. Most of the defects you'll have will be minor oversights and typos, easily found by looking at a source-code listing or stepping through the code in a debugger. For the remaining harder bugs, this chapter describes how to make debugging much easier than it usually is.

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Code Complete
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Second Edition
ISBN: 0735619670
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 334

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