Debugging the Application

One of the most important skills to develop in web development is the skill of debugging. This is the skill of tracking down what exactly is not working and then fixing it. Debugging is difficult to learn, and difficult to teach. Much of our expertise in debugging comes from experience. Part of why debugging is so difficult is that we are really trying to solve two problems.

When we notice a problem in a software project, we must be able to make that problem occur on purpose. If we cannot reproduce a problem, then we cannot ever test that we have actually solved the problem. This is often murky area in software development: People see intermittent problems and blame them on the wrong things. As developers, we can only fix the problems we can identify and reproduce, so we know that we are actually fixing the correct issue.

Once we've determined a way to reproduce a bug and we know exactly how to cause it to happen, we must then solve the second problem: Actually fixing the bug. Sometimes this is the easiest part. It can be difficult to figure out how to cause a bug to happen, but then it may turn out that the bug is simple to fix once it has been identified. Other times the error itself is quite complex and difficult to fix.

However we approach debugging, it's a crucial step in software development. Spending time truly solving problems in our applications will help us become much better developers.