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More Testing Means Better Debugging

posted 10:44AM Feb 08, 2007 with tags debug softwaredevelopment softwarequality test by Lars Trieloff

Cedric Beust, lead developer of TestNG writes in More testing doesn't mean less debugging
This myth that "testing means no more debugging" needs to die. Seriously. Anyone making this claim is doing a lot of damage to the software engineering world. Just as we are finally getting good IDE's, good debuggers and, more importantly, an increasingly widespread conviction in the developer community that these tools are part of a healthy software engineering process, a new vanguard of smug programmers come out of the woodwork with their superior attitude and resurrect the old mantra that only bad developers use debuggers.
Cedric continues to point out how the debugger has become an invaluable tool for software development as it allows him to verify his assumtions during development, to examine the runtime behaviour of the software, as the pure static sourcecode is just a description of a software system.

The value of unit tests in regard to debugging is that they allow more structured, repeatable debug situations. I use test cases to create situations that need further verification and can then step through the program at runtime.

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