How to Improve your Debugging Processes
Here are four must-implement steps to add to your software development life cycle to improve your team’s debugging process.
When working on an application with a team, there come many opportunities for debugging. Debugging is the process of finding and resolving bugs. At first, everyone is very familiar with the project: they know what they’re going to build and what problems the application may potentially solve or have.
Over time, as developers work their magic, the codebase gets larger and larger. However, since everyone’s familiar with everything, it’s easy to diagnose a bug when it comes up and quickly resolve it. There are multiple ways and methods to diagnose bugs when the team knows everything about the code, like remote debugging or unit testing.
However, as the codebase grows, developers who worked on the code leave the company and are replaced by new developers. In this constantly changing environment, the team may lose understanding of the code, and things may get lost in translation.
So, how can one fix this? Below are four must-implement steps to add to your software development life cycle to improve your team’s debugging process.
Testing
This one’s quite obvious: testing can help you understand which parts of the codebase work and which ones don’t. It would be best if you run tests frequently and periodically, especially after every significant change. This is a way to prevent bugs from popping up in shipment and understand your application’s end goal. It can also help new members appreciate the logic behind your code’s design.
Of course, many developers don’t like writing tests, especially in test-driven development (TDD) approach environments. In TDD, you write tests before you even run the code. This is supposed to help you understand what you should and shouldn’t have in your code at runtime.
As a result, you test your project from the very beginning and avoid facing many common bugs. However, finding and fixing bugs without testing and adding new errors can become very hard when your project is enormous.
Consider implementing a comprehensive set of tests, including unit tests, functional tests, integrational tests, and so on.
Logging
Application logs help you find helpful information while going through the code. They help track the progress of your application and understand why specific bugs and issues pop up. There are many ways you can use logging to your advantage.
The most common way is to add logs manually to your code. This means tracking and documenting information that can help trace code behavior. You can also add a few files for logging different types of errors. Switch these types depending on the environment application.
Of course, sometimes searching through multiple files can get tedious. So, you can use logging tools to improve your debugging process by searching logs, gathering them in one place, and providing a comfortable web interface to view them.
You can also set up a chat messaging function on Slack or some other messenger through some tools for urgent fatal errors or critical issues. This way, the tool will notify the entire team of these issues as soon as they are discovered.
Containerization
To prevent bugs like blink bugs, I recommend using containers.
In a container, you can set up all your requirements to be uniform for all your environments—test, development, and production. For example, you can have different interpreters set up in your production environment and on a local machine. This can bring unexpected bugs.
But with containers, you can set up the same version for every machine. So there will be no chance to have different installed packages that can bring some strange issues. Containerization also enables your application to run very fast on any new machine.
Debuggers
Finally, you can try to use tools like debuggers. These tools allow you to debug your application on the fly. They provide you with a way to look at how your code behaves while running.
You can do this by adding breakpoints in some lines of code via the debugger. It will stop at these lines and give you helpful information about the values of variables, exceptions, memory usage, and so on. For example, you can step into the function, take a look at what happens inside of it, go over the function, and then move to the next one until you find the reason for the bug, or you can skip some part of the code.
Moreover, you will need to perform debugging in a live production server at some point. Some bugs reveal themselves only there and not in any other environment. Remote debugging makes this process possible. You can set up your debugger to operate remotely. It will connect to your local IDE and debug exactly as a debugger would in a local machine.
Conclusion
I hope this article has helped you understand how to avoid bugs and how to find bugs. I also hope that it taught you something new about debugging processes. Following these techniques is sure to make your life as a developer a little bit easier.