Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

Debugger APIs

Think back for a moment to some of your first programming experiences, the ones right after you discovered or were shown how to use the debugger. It changed how you interacted with the software. Instead of inserting print statements only to rip or comment them out later, you could step through, skipping over the parts irrelevant to your investigation and dropping to statement-level or even assembly-level detail to know intimately how your software really operated.

Have you used a debugger that handles multiple threads well? It vastly simplifies the task of controlling the interactions between the threads. You can pause a thread at a break point and walk it and the threads it interacts with through their executions in whatever sequence ...