Abstract:

We like to write code but—despite our best efforts—we make mistakes. Our program will contain bugs. Sometimes, we don’t write what we mean to write, sometimes we don’t understand an aspect of our programming language and at other times we lack—or fail to consider—some critical information about our program’s system environment. As a result, our program will not behave correctly. What do we do now? 

In this talk, I would like to take you through the entire debugging process, starting with a program that crashes. What do we do next? Which questions do we have to ask? What information do we need? What can we do to find the cause of the crash? Which tools can help us in this quest, and, last but not least, what can we do to make sure this bug never happens again?

Thanks to real-world examples that we have encountered—and debugged—at think-cell over the years, you will learn how to reproduce, locate, understand and fix even the most difficult bugs.

Key learnings: Debugging is super hard. Most developers cannot write error-free code so we have to find the bugs in our code and other people's code. I will walk through the debugging process from the initial report to the final bugfix. You will learn how to find Heisenbugs and how to fix them reliably.