depends mostly on the type of issue, i don't believe that there's a one size fits all sort of solution. for timing sensitive issues or core dumps, it's typical

depends mostly on the type of issue, i don't believe that there's a one size fits all sort of solution. for timing sensitive issues or core dumps, it's typically low level things like gdb, trace, etc. for memory issues, obviously tools like valgrind, etc help. in the olden days when i used ide's like visual studio or netbeans, i'd often times leverage their native debuggers to set watchpoints and step through code. but those days are over, now i mostly use interpreted languages like python, ruby, and compiled languages like golang (highly recommended). print statements are the way to go, especially if you're writing server side code (restful apis, websockets, etc), you'll want the log information as you won't be able to attach a debugger to a production system. just a random thought based on this topic, if debug/log/print statements were detailed enough, one could actually take a log file and write some code to parse that and transform into test cases in your favorite test framework, that may have some effect on saving time writing test cases. for production bugs, you could take the log output as the reproducer steps to generate test cases to cover this. and i really liked the comment about tdd and more importantly unit testing, it's critical and helps developers better organize their code.