Get the latest tech news

Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)


tire book revolves around the "nine rules." After the typical introduction and list of the rules, there's one chapter for each rule. Each of these chapters describes the rule, explains why it's a rule, and includes several "sub-rules" that explain how to apply the rule.

It's best for developers who are novices or who are only moderately experienced, but even old pros will find helpful reminders of things they know they should do but forget in the rush of the moment. Make it fail: Do it again, start at the beginning, stimulate the failure, don't simulate the failure, find the uncontrolled condition that makes it intermittent, record everything and find the signature of intermittent bugs, don't trust statistics too much, know that "that" can happen, and never throw away a debugging tool. But it'd be very useful to give good general advice, specific suggestions, and examples of what approaches to take for common types of tools (like symbolic debuggers, digital logic probes, etc.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of golden rules

golden rules