Effective Debugging ─ 66 Specific Ways to Debug Software and Systems

Every software developer 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. InEffective Debugging, Diomidis Spinellis helps you accelerate your journey to mastery, by systematically categorizing, explaining, and illustrating scores of today's best methods, strategies, techniques, and tools.

Drawing on 25+ years of experience, Spinellis helps you expand the arsenal of techniques you're comfortable with, and choose the approaches that work best for each challenge. He presents vendor-neutral, example-rich coverage of general principles, high level strategies, concrete techniques, high-efficiency tools, creative tricks, and the behavioral traits associated with effective debugging. His 52 step-by-step techniques address every facet of debugging, including:

• Building an effective debugging environment
• Tracking issues and reproducing problems
• Using online resources
• Stepping through code, adding breakpoints, and using call stacks
• Optimizing and automating debugging workflows
• Collaborating with others on debugging
• Debugging at compile time and run time
• Simplifying, rewriting, and improving code to avoid bugs
• Using debug mode
• Varying execution environments
• Working with command line tools
• Making the most of revision control and logs
• Debugging multithreaded, asynchronous, and embedded device code
• And much more

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.