3 ms·

I totally agree with "Debugging is an art and discipline in and of itself" for issues that are difficult to reproduce. With a reproduction, debugging should be

I totally agree with "Debugging is an art and discipline in and of itself" for issues that are difficult to reproduce. With a reproduction, debugging should be straightforward for any engineer. For reproducible issues, it's scientific method plug and chug for me: observe an interesting behavior, theorize about cause, test, rinse, repeat. Unfortunately, I am too often amazed at the engineers that don't go through this exercise before asking for help.

fr0styMatt2 11y ago
For those 'hard to reproduce' issues, it's about knowing what debugging and forensics tools are out there and making sure that the systems you deploy support postmortem debugging and issue analysis. Things like creating crash dump files, then giving your field technicians or customers an easy way to get this data to you with an incident report (or even having the system do it automatically if applicable); logging systems that can be left switched on all the time and dynamically reconfigured (so that there's less chance of the damn thing being off when an issue does occur). Also awareness of things like tools that analyze or try and provoke race conditions, etc.