I've heard of top-down and bottom-up design, and what you're describing sounds like top-down debugging, in contrast to "open the debugger at the first bug" -- b

I've heard of top-down and bottom-up design, and what you're describing sounds like top-down debugging, in contrast to "open the debugger at the first bug" -- bottom-up debugging? They're both great, like having two sets of teeth to grind problems down to a fine digestible paste. My software engineering prof encouraged us to use both approaches to programming. The analogy to teeth, however, is my own.