Code Complete, 2nd Edition

Chapter 23. Debugging

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Contents

• Overview of Debugging Issues

• Finding a Defect

• Fixing a Defect

• Psychological Considerations in Debugging

• Debugging Tools—Obvious and Not-So-Obvious

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 ...