Software Architecture with Python

Simple debugging tricks and techniques

We saw the power of the simple print statement in the previous example. In a similar way, other simple techniques can be used to debug programs without requiring to resort to a debugger.

Debugging can be thought of as a step-wise process of exclusion until the programmer arrives at the truth—the cause of the bug. It essentially involves the following steps:

• Analyze the code and come up with a set of probable assumptions (causes) that may be the source of the bug.
• Test out each of the assumptions one by one by using appropriate debugging techniques.
• At every step of the test, you either arrive at the source of the bug—as the test succeeds telling you the problem was with the specific cause you were testing for; ...