Chapter 3: Lord Peter Wimsey

Does it occur to you that what’s the matter with this case is that there are too many clues?

—Lord Peter Wimsey

3.1 Preview

This chapter explains the methods of the amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey and how they can be applied to debugging software. This section begins by reviewing the life and character of Lord Peter. It summarizes the points of Wimsey’s methodology that apply to software debugging and expands on the metaphor of a software defect as a crime. It concludes by identifying techniques that Lord Peter Wimsey employed in his detective work, with quotes from the Wimsey stories for each technique.