Effective Debugging

Author: Diomidis Spinellis
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN: 0134394887
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
Every software developer and IT professional understands the crucial importance of effective debugging. Often, debugging consumes most of a developer’s workday, and mastering the required techniques and skills can take a lifetime. In Effective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis helps experienced programmers accelerate their journey to mastery, by systematically categorizing, explaining, and illustrating the most useful debugging methods, strategies, techniques, and tools. Drawing on more than thirty-five years of experience, Spinellis expands your arsenal of debugging techniques, helping you choose the best approaches for each challenge. He presents vendor-neutral, example-rich advice on general principles, high-level strategies, concrete techniques, high-efficiency tools, creative tricks, and the behavioral traits associated with effective debugging. Spinellis’s 66 expert techniques address every facet of debugging and are illustrated with step-by-step instructions and actual code. He addresses the full spectrum of problems that can arise in modern software systems, especially problems caused by complex interactions among components and services running on hosts scattered around the planet. Whether you’re debugging isolated runtime errors or catastrophic enterprise system failures, this guide will help you get the job done—more quickly, and with less pain. Key features include High-level strategies and methods for addressing diverse software failures Specific techniques to apply when programming, compiling, and running code Better ways to make the most of your debugger General-purpose skills and tools worth investing in Advanced ideas and techniques for escaping dead-ends and the maze of complexity Advice for making programs easier to debug Specialized approaches for debugging multithreaded, asynchronous, and embedded code Bug avoidance through improved software design, construction, and management

The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Author: Norman Matloff
Publisher: No Starch Press
ISBN: 1593272316
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Debugging is crucial to successful software development, but even many experienced programmers find it challenging. Sophisticated debugging tools are available, yet it may be difficult to determine which features are useful in which situations. The Art of Debugging is your guide to making the debugging process more efficient and effective. The Art of Debugging illustrates the use three of the most popular debugging tools on Linux/Unix platforms: GDB, DDD, and Eclipse. The text-command based GDB (the GNU Project Debugger) is included with most distributions. DDD is a popular GUI front end for GDB, while Eclipse provides a complete integrated development environment. In addition to offering specific advice for debugging with each tool, authors Norm Matloff and Pete Salzman cover general strategies for improving the process of finding and fixing coding errors, including how to: –Inspect variables and data structures –Understand segmentation faults and core dumps –Know why your program crashes or throws exceptions –Use features like catchpoints, convenience variables, and artificial arrays –Avoid common debugging pitfalls Real world examples of coding errors help to clarify the authors’ guiding principles, and coverage of complex topics like thread, client-server, GUI, and parallel programming debugging will make you even more proficient. You'll also learn how to prevent errors in the first place with text editors, compilers, error reporting, and static code checkers. Whether you dread the thought of debugging your programs or simply want to improve your current debugging efforts, you'll find a valuable ally in The Art of Debugging.

Debugging

Author: David J. Agans
Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM
ISBN: 0814426786
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
When the pressure is on to resolve an elusive software or hardware glitch, what’s needed is a cool head courtesy of a set of rules guaranteed to work on any system, in any circumstance. Written in a frank but engaging style, this book provides simple, foolproof principles guaranteed to help find any bug quickly. Recognized tech expert and author David Agans changes the way you think about debugging, making those pesky problems suddenly much easier to find and fix. Agans identifies nine simple, practical rules that are applicable to any software application or hardware system, which can help detect any bug, no matter how tricky or obscure. Illustrating the rules with real-life bug-detection war stories, Debugging shows you how to: Understand the system: how perceiving the ""roadmap"" can hasten your journey Quit thinking and look: when hands-on investigation can’t be avoided Isolate critical factors: why changing one element at a time can be an essential tool Keep an audit trail: how keeping a record of the debugging process can win the day Whether the system or program you’re working on has been designed wrong, built wrong, or used wrong, Debugging helps you think correctly about bugs, so the problems virtually reveal themselves.

Debugging Teams

Author: Brian W. Fitzpatrick
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1491932511
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
In the course of their 20+-year engineering careers, authors Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman have picked up a treasure trove of wisdom and anecdotes about how successful teams work together. Their conclusion? Even among people who have spent decades learning the technical side of their jobs, most haven’t really focused on the human component. Learning to collaborate is just as important to success. If you invest in the "soft skills" of your job, you can have a much greater impact for the same amount of effort. The authors share their insights on how to lead a team effectively, navigate an organization, and build a healthy relationship with the users of your software. This is valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular series of talks—including "Working with Poisonous People"—has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.

Advanced Debugging Methods

Author: Raimondas Lencevicius
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441987746
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 190

Book Description
Object relationships in modern software systems are becoming increasingly numerous and complex, and program errors due to violations of object relationships are difficult to detect. Programmers need new tools that allow them to explore objects in a large system more efficiently and to detect broken object relationships instantaneously. Such tools incorporate approaches used in such areas as data visualization, pattern matching and extraction, database querying, active databases, and rule-based programming. The query-based debugging approach developed by the author of this book is another powerful yet efficient tool to be added to the developer's tool chest. Advanced Debugging Methods presents practice and tools for debugging computer programs. This book proposes new powerful approaches that simplify the daunting task of debugging complex software systems. Although debugging has been addressed in numerous research papers, many of its methods have yet to be explored in a book-length format. This book helps to fill this gap by presenting an overview of existing debugging tools with motivating examples and case studies, as well as presenting new, state-of-the-art debugging methods. Advanced Debugging Methods will be of use to software developers looking for tools to be applied in cutting edge practice; system architects looking at the relationship between software design and debugging; tools and programming language researchers looking for new ideas in run-time tool implementation as well as detailed descriptions of advanced implementations; and university professors and graduate students who will use this book as supplementary reading for graduate courses in programming tools, language implementation, and advanced object-oriented systems. Advanced Debugging Methods is also a handy reference of currently existing debugging methodologies as well as a springboard for cutting-edge research to simplify the difficult task of debugging and to facilitate the development of more robust software systems.

Debugging by Thinking

Author: Robert C. Metzger
Publisher: Digital Press
ISBN: 1555583075
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 595

Book Description
Debugging by Thinking: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach is the first book to apply the wisdom of six disciplines-logic, mathematics, psychology, safety analysis, computer science, and engineering-to the problem of debugging. It uses the methods of literary detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, the techniques of mathematical problem solving, the results of research into the cognitive psychology of human error, the root cause analyses of safety experts, the compiler analyses of computer science, and the processes of modern engineering to define a systematic approach to identifying and correcting software errors. * Language Independent Methods: Examples are given in Java and C++ * Complete source code shows actual bugs, rather than contrived examples * Examples are accessible with no more knowledge than a course in Data Structures and Algorithms requires * A "thought process diary" shows how the author actually resolved the problems as they occurred

Debugging Techniques Finding and Fixing Bugs

Author: Sunil Kumar Saini
Publisher: Sunil Kumar Saini
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 45

Book Description
"Debugging Techniques: Finding and Fixing Bugs" is a book that provides guidance on identifying and resolving software bugs in computer programs. The book covers a range of techniques and strategies that can be used to debug code, including debugging tools, testing methodologies, and best practices for identifying and isolating bugs. The book is aimed at programmers and software developers of all levels, from beginners to experienced professionals. It covers both the theoretical and practical aspects of debugging, including how to approach different types of bugs, how to use debugging tools effectively, and how to work collaboratively to identify and fix bugs in complex software projects. Overall, "Debugging Techniques: Finding and Fixing Bugs" is a comprehensive guide to the art of debugging that provides readers with the knowledge and skills needed to improve the quality and reliability of their software applications.

The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Author: Norman S. Matloff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781593270025
Category : Computer software
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Debugging is of central importance to successful software development, and yet many beginning programmers are unaware of the techniques they can use to reduce the time they spend finding and fixing programming errors. GDB, a popular open source debugger, allows a programmer to trace program execution line by line, set breakpoints, inspect variables, and look at what the program is doing at any given time. Using an assortment of real-world coding errors, from simple typos to major logical blunders. The Art of Debugging with GDB discusses how to manage memory, understand core dumps, and trace programming errors to their root cause. The book covers topics other debugging books omit such as threaded, server/client, GUI, and parallel programming as well as how to avoid common debugging pitfalls. Readers also learn about techniques and tools they can use to prevent errors, saving themselves valuable time and effort.

Toward Effective Debugging by Capturing and Reusing Knowledge

Author: Zhongxian Gu
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781321016840
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Debugging is an arduous task --- localizing and resolving bugs pervade the software development process. The cost of software maintenance accounts for two-thirds of the overall software production cost. Correctly and quickly fixing a bug reduces cost and improves software quality. This dissertation presents three complementary research efforts that target and ease different stages of debugging.The first concerns the testing and verification of bug fixes. It introduces and formalizes the \emph{bad fix} problem: a fix is bad if it does not properly fix the bug or introduces new bugs. Bad fixes are difficult to detect as they successfully pass the original failing test cases and are more costly to fix. Our research proposes novel approaches to detect bad fixes to avoid them in an early stage. The bad fix problem emphasizes the importance and difficulty of debugging and helps understand and ease the debugging process. The second aims to help developers fix bugs. Our insight is to leverage existing debugging knowledge to fix new bugs. We hypothesize that with respect to the millions of already encountered bugs, unique and new bugs are rare --- most bugs have similar bugs. We have designed and developed OSCILLOSCOPE, a bug repository and search engine to allow developers search for similar bugs. Learning from similar bugs and how they were fixed, developers can more quickly understand and propose correct fixes to bugs. To ease the use of OSCILLOSCOPE and understand how developers debug, we introduce IDEPP, an infrastructure that systematically captures fine-grained IDE interactions. IDEPP forms the third part of this dissertation. It can serve as the basis to support an ecosystem of user-aware applications including OSCILLOSCOPE and others. In particular, IDEPP not only facilitates the use of OSCILLOSCOPE, but also enables other general applications to improve programming productivity.

Debugging Teams

Author: Brian W. Fitzpatrick
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
ISBN: 1491932503
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 190