Questions tagged [debugging]
Debugging is the process of examining the state of a program - generally with a debugging tool - while it is running and attempting to find bugs that cause it to behave abnormally.
253 questions
3votes
1answer
192views
How to manage working directory in interactive development environments like Jupyter Notebook?
I'm having trouble with managing the working directory in Jupyter Notebook. For example, I have a .py script that requires me to change the working directory to its directory to run it properly. I've ...
- 47
22votes
4answers
6kviews
How do AI developers for LLM fix bugs when the LLM misbehaves, given that they cannot control what the LLM learns from the data?
The traditional non AI software with if-then-else and loop statements can be fully controlled. In contrast, machine learning software behaviour is unpredictable since the developer cannot control what ...
- 331
4votes
6answers
359views
Should a bug fixer know the overall structure what the program does?
I heard that if you maintain a program, you have to study what the code does. Another engineer said it is not necessary. Just use test cases to find out the function that does not work well, modify ...
guest
1vote
2answers
335views
Code platform only accepts manual copy-pasting. How to debug the code locally effeciently?
I'm writing a script for a webapp, which I can only copy my code manually to its platform and not push it from my machine. In the code there are parts that use its API and parts that don't. I cannot ...
- 325
18votes
10answers
6kviews
Code readability and debugging
Sometimes, I have a hard time deciding between two good code traits: debuggability and readability. The snippets below are an oversimplification, but they illustrate my pain. Example 1: if(...
- 423
-1votes
1answer
116views
Debugging miscompile [closed]
Recently I encountered an issue at work where a unit test written in C++ would crash only when being compiled with MSVC 2017 (MSVC 2019 and up are fine). I tried to debug this issue and it seems like ...
- 107
1vote
6answers
1kviews
What are some considerations when deciding to fix a bug, or rewrite the code in question?
At some organizations I'm seeing a trend where if a bug is reported, engineers will directly rewrite the offending code without knowing the root cause. In general this will fix the bug, but in my ...
- 127
0votes
2answers
107views
TL suggests that testing, refactor, and tool usage could avoid the need for verbose logging
Additional Context I make infrastructure for automated device testing. Debugging can be very time consuming because the devices have many states and are constantly being updated with new builds which ...
- 1,685
-4votes
3answers
176views
is it bad practise to go back to your last backup when you encounter an unneccessary bug? [closed]
I find when I am programming and I fix a bug in one area of the codebase, sometimes something slightly related or maybe unrelated breaks, and as a result I usually copy and paste the fix to a ...
0votes
2answers
597views
Debugging to track attribute change
I have a very large C++ application running on a *nix environment, which is occasionally setting a particular date attribute on a structure, way off what it should be. I know which structure and which ...
- 241
0votes
1answer
197views
How far can one debug a low-level API in closed-source environments?
Assume a low-level API is provided without source code (e.g. DirectX). The API provides a virtualization of hardware resources (GPU, CPU, audio card, etc.), which enables the user to call hardware-...
- 11
0votes
1answer
242views
A bug was found in my code. Should I migrate the application as planned, or focus on patching the bug?
While testing my iOS application against the latest version, I've discovered a bug. For the purpose of this question, I am omitting the details of the bug. I was planning to migrate the application to ...
- 2,063
2votes
0answers
131views
In debugging, how to set breakpoints in expressions?
In (the most widely used) programming languages there is a distinction between "statements" (function or loops bodies, assignments... basically "the stuff that ends with a ';'") ...
1vote
3answers
935views
Debug statements in production quality code?
Would anyone here recommend using debug statements such as the following in production quality code? I think these are personally one of the easiest to include or exclude, but they make the code hard ...
1vote
3answers
1kviews
Is bug fixing and debugging the same thing?
I know debugging and bug fixing are related and generally, bug fixing is considered as a subset of debugging (for example here in Wikipedia, "The process of finding and fixing bugs is termed &...
