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Debugging time should be measured

UPDATE: Changed title from “The dangers of debugging“ to “Debugging time should be measured“ because it's a mistake to give the impression that cleansing a computer program of ones bugs and defects is an evil act.

One of the things that I'll be trying to do next year is to encourage other developers that I'm associated with to spend less time "on the debugger".  I read a couple of blog entries this morning which extrapolated out some of the facts and figures associated with debugging; one of particular interest was this one: Cost of Debugging.

My preference for a development day is something more like this:

  • first 3 hours PLAN (Work out how to do it)
  • next 3 hours IMPLEMENT THE PLAN (Code it)
  • final 2 hours FIX THE IMPLEMENTATION (Debug/Test it)
Posted: Dec 22 2003, 07:30 AM by digory | with 1 comment(s)
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Comments

Iain said:

I favour integrating the "Test it" phase with the "Code it" phase, although I always have more tests to write after. If you can test as you write, you spend even less time debugging because you don't write everything and then come back to the routine(s) when not working, they're still in your head because you wrote the test first, and now you're writing the code and testing simultaneously (more or less).

Very effective, I find.
# December 21, 2003 6:15 PM
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