Blogging Roller

I'm pretty sure that I first heard the term "brute force debugging" from my mom, who is also a programmer. I was writing about debugging this weekend, so I tried to find the origin of the term via Google. I didn't find the origin, but I did find some interesting <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Ehendrixs/classes/lectures/lecture_10.pdf">lecture notes on debugging by Susan Hendrix of the <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/">Univ. of Colorado, Boulder. I really like Hendrix's guidelines for debugging. The first two are think and sleep on it. Great advice, wouldn't you agree? I really need to do more of both, whether I am involved in debugging or not.

Hendrix really doesn't like brute force debugging. She says that there are three brute force debugging techniques: 1) use of dumps, 2) scattering print statements randomly, and 3) over-reliance on debuggers. That doesn't sound quite right. My mom taught me that brute force debugging was the practice of placing well positioned print statements in code to locate where a bug is occuring. I like that definition better, but it is my mom's definition so what do you expect? If my mom was still programming today, I bet she'd be using Log4J, or something similar, instead of brute force debugging, no matter how you define it.