Effective Debugging 66 Specific Ways To Debug S... May 2026

Formulate a hypothesis about why the bug occurs and create an experiment to prove/disprove it.

Don't just rely on interactive debuggers; use structured logging to see history. Effective Debugging 66 Specific Ways to Debug S...

Spinellis argues that debugging is often the most time-consuming part of software development. He organizes his 66 items into high-level categories that move from to technical tooling . Reproducibility: If you can't trigger it, you can't fix it. Formulate a hypothesis about why the bug occurs

Don't change code randomly hoping the bug disappears. Effective Debugging 66 Specific Ways to Debug S...

Sometimes the bug is a full disk or a bad network cable.