Using a debugger on pre-production code is a waste of an opportunity to create good tests. A debugger can be useful when debugging production code, especially

Using a debugger on pre-production code is a waste of an opportunity to create good tests. A debugger can be useful when debugging production code, especially when the heat is on. This is no time to stand on ceremony and idealism. For learning new code, particularly frameworks ime, a step debugger is incredibly valuable. But you are not really debugging in that case. A debugger is a non essential tool these days. But if the kernel boys said they found it useful, then I'd not argue.