Debugging tips

Answering questions on the newsgroups, I've noticed that several developers seem to find debugging very difficult - not the mechanics of it, so much as knowing the right place to start. This is not to say that they are lazy or stupid - just that debugging is an art unto itself (arguably more so than writing code in the first place - it certainly involves more intuition in my view), and that a few pointers could be useful.


Making use of the techniques discussed on this page won't make you an ace bug-finder in itself - a mixture of patience, experience, intuition and good practice is needed - but my hope is that it can get you started along the right path. Note that although the page title is "Debugging", a lot of the time you may well not need to step through your code in a debugger in order to fix your code. If I'm trying to find a problem in my own code, without external dependencies such as other whole systems being involved, I usually regard it as a failure on my part if I need to use the debugger. It indicates that my code isn't clear enough and my unit tests aren't robust enough.