Hi Does anyone know how can one improve his debugging skills or how can one narrow down the problem and try to get to the solution ASAP.Or rather how once should approach a problem.I know this is a bit vague question but I want to know how you people approach?
Thanks

I always develop using and IDE and I always figure out how to run the software using the debugger in the IDE. I rarely add console logging statements just to help troubleshoot. I set breakpoints just before the trouble starts and step through the code. It often takes several runs so I'm always updating the breakpoint locations. Debugging someone else's code is harder since its often unclear where to start (or stop).

Not sure what your language is, but Eclipse has support for C/C++ and integrates with the GNU debugger on Linux.

You always want to divide and conquer when debugging. If you do not have access to a debugger, you want to put bread crumbs in your code to show you the execution path up to the point of failure.

I usually define a macro like this:
Then you can just copy and paste BREADCRUMB through your your entire code path. When you run your code, you will see the last bread crumb before it crashes or reports an error.

Then you can add more bread crumbs until you have bracketed the problem down to the exact line.

This method is very useful in debugging on embedded targets. On a desktop, you will almost always have access to a source level debugger which will allow you to put a break point before the code that fails. Then you just single step until you find the cause of the problem.

Fixing the actual error is a science unto itself. You need to have a very good understanding of pointers and how stacks work. Most bugs are caused by bad pointer arithmetic or stack overflow. If your bug is not one of those, it will usually be a bad argument to a function.

If you are using GCC, you can detect most errors before you even run your program by passing the "-Wall -Werror" options to GCC. That will tell GCC to report all warnings and treat them as errors. If you fix all the warnings, you will remove 90% of the errors in your code.

I also found a new trick yesterday. If you pass "-Os" to GCC, it will crank up the warning level as it will no longer auto-initialize stack variables for you. So you will see more errors where you failed to initialized a stack variable before use.

If you are using GCC and a debugger, don't forget to pass "-g" to GCC when compiling and when linking. If you forget the latter, the debugging information will not be added to the executable during the link phase.

Run valgrind on your compiled code to see if it finds dangling pointer problems. Run your code in a debugger like ddd or whatever you have available, and also use the bread crumbs as mentioned in one of the previous postings. There are many possible problem, so you should train your skills for every possible method of bug tracing.

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