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Right, this is the common sense approach for identifying the cause of a regression. Not sure what people do other than this unless it's a very simple codebase

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I don't see this technique applied too often. I see more often:

- reading the affected code - reproducing the problem step by step with a debugger

Which I guess works for all kinds of problems and not just for regressions, therefore people are more used to it?

My thought is in a complex system the cause of the regression is not usually near the point of failure, so debugging can become unmanageable without the upfront effort of identifying a small set of changes that might be responsible, so you have some more places to set your breakpoints.

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