Debugging Bets

Hi HN,

This is the third part in a series of articles in my “Risk-First” (focused on addressing the concept of Risk in Software Development).

It’s looking at the question of, to what extent is debugging a series of gambles?

In looking for a bug, every time we try something out, we’re gambling our development time against testing some part of our code to narrow the range of places where the bug can live.

This is how it feels to me. I’d appreciate some feedback from the community on this.

I don’t use a debugger. I just use a REPL to try things out and ‘explore’ the state of my code.

If it doesn’t come back with what I’m expecting then that’s a bug.

The idea of opening up a debugger again seems like a step backwards to be honest.