The Debugger is dead, long live the Debugger!

by Karel Thönissen

At Garabit, the use of debuggers already was minimal. Our developers estimate that our quality assurance framework reduced their time spent in debuggers with 75% compared to earlier programming jobs they did. I estimate that I spent less than 10 minutes in the debugger per month. However, I always had some trouble convincing others to stamp out their last use of debuggers completely. From now on this will be simple: conventional debugging is a completely waste of time, talent, energy and coffee. This is obvious for anyone who has seen our improved QA system work. With our new framework in place, we have a mechanism that not only discovers errors in source code very early without having to trace or watch anything, it also allows us to determine the location of the error exactly to the statement level in a split second. It is almost to good to be true. Loosely speaking, we have refuted the Heisenberg-principle of software engineering, knowing both the timing/presence and the location of an error. [complete article]