How much time do you spend in debugging? Well, I know that the question is bit vague and the answer would vary. After spending close to 15 years in Computer Programming, I still can’t say confidently how much time I really spend in debugging things. There could be multiple factors that influence it and make it uncertain to answer:

• Do you follow Test Driven Development(TDD) and your test cases get updated as you write new features?
• Have you got good code coverage?
• What’s the Complexity of the issue in hand?
• Do you have adequate tooling system to help with?
• What are your test strategies?
• … and few more that may be specific to your team and environment.

While there are many other factors to consider to time-box your debugging for finding fix, there is one very important consideration to make. Debugging is a Skill and it can be improved.

First, Accepting the Fact

Yes, right. We, the developers are the primary bug creators and it is perfectly fine to be like that. With that, we are also responsible to ‘debug’ the code to make it bugs free(as much as possible!).

In rest of the article, I will be explaining what I have been doing to improve my Debugging Techniques. You might see something in common.

#debugging #programming languages #developer #webdev #general programming