Effective Debugging: 52 Specific Ways to Debug Software and Systems

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

Diomidis Spinellis is a professor in the Department of Management Science and Technology at the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece. His research interests include software engineering, IT security, and programming languages. He has written two award-winning, widely translated books,  Code Reading (2003) and  Code Quality (2006), both published by Addison-Wesley. He served for a decade as a member of the  IEEE Software editorial board, authoring the “Tools of the Trade” column, and since January 2015 is serving as the editor-in-chief. He has contributed code that ships with OS X and BSD Unix, and is the developer of UMLGraph, CScout, and other open-source software packages, libraries, and tools. He holds an MEng in software engineering and a PhD in computer science, both from Imperial College London. Dr. Spinellis is a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE.