Debugging Techniques
To perform the debugging process easily and efficiently, it is necessary to
follow some techniques. The most commonly used debugging strategies are,
Debugging by brute force
Induction strategy
Deduction strategy
Backtracking strategy and
Debugging by testing.
Debugging by brute force is the most commonly used technique. This is done by
taking memory dumps of the program which contains a large amount of information
with intermediate values and analyzing them, but analyzing the information and
finding the bugs leads to a waste of time and effort.
Induction strategy includes the Location of relevant data, the Organization of
data, the Devising hypothesis (provides possible causes of errors), and the
Proving hypothesis.
Deduction strategy includes Identification of possible causes of bugs or
hypothesis Elimination of possible causes using the information Refining of
the hypothesis( analyzing one-by-one)
The backtracking strategy is used to locate errors in small programs. When an
error occurs, the program is traced one step backward during the evaluation of
values to find the cause of bug or error.
Debugging by testing is the conjunction with debugging by induction and
debugging by deduction technique. The test cases used in debugging are
different from the test cases used in the testing process.