Debug It! : Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code

by Butcher, Paul

• ISBN13: 9781934356289
• ISBN10: 193435628X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-11-15
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

Professional programmers develop a knack of unerringly zeroing in on the root cause of a bug. They can do that because they've written a lot of buggy code and then gained experience fixing it. This book captures all this experience-use it, and you'll find you write fewer bugs, and the ones you do write will become easier to hunt down.

Author Biography

Paul Butcher started out writing games for 8-bit home computers before he was a teenager, and since then has worked in diverse fields at all levels of abstraction, from microcode on bit-slice processors to high-level declarative programming and all points in between. He's been using agile approaches for the last several years, although had adopted many of the same techniques before the agile movement gave them a name. Paul's depth of experience derives from a history of working for startups in which he's had the privilege of working with several great teams on cutting edge technology.

In an attempt to demonstrate that he's at least as fast as Lewis Hamilton, Paul totaled his race-car last year. So no more playing with expensive toys for the time being-but he will be back on track soon!

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
About This Book	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xii
The Heart of the Problem	p. 1
A Method in the Madness	p. 3
Debugging Is More Than "Making the Bug Go Away"	p. 3
The Empirical Approach	p. 5
The Core Debugging Process	p. 6
First Things First	p. 7
Put it in Action	p. 11
Reproduce	p. 13
Reproduce First, Ask Questions Later	p. 13
Controlling the Software	p. 15
Controlling the Environment	p. 16
Controlling Inputs	p. 18
Refining Your Reproduction	p. 26
What If You Really Can't Reproduce It?	p. 35
Put It in Action	p. 38
Diagnose	p. 39
Stand Back-I'm Going to Try Science	p. 39
Stratagems	p. 46
Debuggers	p. 52
Pitfalls	p. 53
Mind Games	p. 57
Validate Your Diagnosis	p. 62
Put it in Action	p. 63
Fix	p. 65
Clearing the Decks	p. 66
Testing	p. 67
Fix the Cause, Not the Symptoms	p. 69
Refactoring	p. 71
Checking in	p. 73
Get Your Code Reviewed	p. 74
Put it in Action	p. 75
Reflect	p. 77
How Did it Ever Work?	p. 77
What Went Wrong?	p. 78
It'll Never Happen Again	p. 81
Close the Loop	p. 84
Put it in Action	p. 85
The Bigger Picture	p. 87
Discovering That You Have a Problem	p. 89
Tracking Bugs	p. 89
Working with Users	p. 94
Working with Support Staff	p. 99
Put it in Action	p. 101
Pragmatic Zero Tolerance	p. 103
Bugs Take Priority	p. 103
The Debugging Mind-Set	p. 106
Digging Yourself Out of a Quality Hole	p. 108
Put it in Action	p. 113
Debug-Fu	p. 115
Special Cases	p. 117
Patching Existing Releases	p. 117
Backward Compatibility	p. 118
Concurrency	p. 123
Heisenbugs	p. 125
Performance Bugs	p. 127
Embedded Software	p. 129
Bugs in Third-Party Software	p. 132
Put it in Action	p. 137
The Ideal Debugging Environment	p. 139
Automated Testing	p. 139
Source Control	p. 142
Automatic Builds	p. 147
Put it in Action	p. 155
Teach Your Software to Debug Itself	p. 157
Assumptions and Assertions	p. 157
Debugging Builds	p. 167
Resource Leaks and Exception Handling	p. 172
Put it in Action	p. 179
Anti-patterns	p. 181
Priority Inflation	p. 181
Prima Donna	p. 182
Maintenance Team	p. 184
Firefighting	p. 186
Rewrite	p. 187
No Code Ownership	p. 189
Black Magic	p. 189
Put it in Action	p. 190
Resources	p. 193
Source Control and Issue-Tracking Systems	p. 193
Build and Continuous Integration Tools	p. 196
Useful Libraries	p. 198
Other Tools	p. 200
Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 207
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