9 Rules of Thumb of Dubugging
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Was this helpful?
Debugging: Figuring out why a design doesnt work as planned
troubleshooting: Figuring out what's broken when the design is known to be good
Once you have bugs, you have to detect them
Understand The system
Make it fail
Quit thinking and look
Divide and conquer
Change one thing at a time
Keep an audit trail
Check the Plug
Get a fresh view
If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed
when all else fails, read the instructions
You need a working knowledge of what the system is supposed to do, how it's designed, and, in some cases, why it was designed that way
To solve the problem
if you don't understand it when you design it, you're more likely to mess up
you have to understand how things are supposed to work if you want to figure out why they don't.
Don't necessarily trust this information, of the manuals/specs supplied
you have to know how the system would normally work
Knowledge of what's normal helps you notice things that aren't.
know a little bit about the fundamentals of your technical field
Initial guesses about where to divide a system in order to isolate the problem depend on your knowing what functions are where
system that are "black boxes,"' meaning that you don't know what's inside them, knowing how they're supposed to interact with other parts allows you to at least locate the problem as being inside the box or outside the box. If the problem is inside the box, you have to replace the box, but if it's outside, you can fix it
Don't waste your debugging time looking at the wrong stuff.
Tools
you have to be able to choose the right tool, use the tool correctly, and interpret the results you get properly
Stepping through source code shows logic errors but not timing or multithread problems; profiling tools can expose timing problems but not logic flaws
Know the language you're writing software in
Summary
• Read the manual. It'll tell you to lubricate the trimmer head on your weed whacker so that the lines don't fuse together. • Read everything in depth. The section about the interrupt getting to your microcomputer is buried on page 37. • Know the fundamentals. Chain saws are supposed to be loud. • Know the road map. Engine speed can be different from tire speed, and the difference is in the transmission. • Understand your tools. Know which end of the thermometer is which, and how to use the fancy features on your Glitch−O−Matic logic analyzer. • Look up the details. Even Einstein looked up the details. Kneejerk, on the other hand,trusted his memory.
Summary
• Do it again. Do it again so you can look at it, so you can focus on the cause, and so you can tell if you fixed it. • Start at the beginning. The mechanic needs to know that the car went through the car wash before the windows froze. • Stimulate the failure. Spray a hose on that leaky window. • But don't simulate the failure. Spray a hose on the leaky window, not on a different, "similar" one. • Find the uncontrolled condition that makes it intermittent. Vary everything you can—shake it, rattle it, roll it, and twist it until it shouts. • Record everything and find the signature of intermittent bugs. Our bonding system always and only failed on jumbled calls. • Don't trust statistics too much. The bonding problem seemed to be related to the time of day, but it was actually the local teenagers tying up the phone lines. • Know that "that" can happen. Even the ice cream flavor can matter. • Never throw away a debugging tool. A robot paddle might come in handy someday.
Notes:
"What do you do when you find a failure?" he would answer, "Try to make it fail again."
Why?
So you can look at it.
In order to see it fail (and we'll discuss this more in the next section), you have to be able to make it fail. You have to make it fail as regularly as possible
So you can focus on the cause.
Knowing under exactly what conditions it will fail helps you focus on probable causes
Can be misleading
So you can tell if you've fixed it.
Once you think you've fixed the problem, having a surefire way to make it fail gives you a surefire test of whether you fixed it.
Make it fail consistently
Write down each step as you go. Then follow your own written procedure to make sure it really causes the error.
Setup system correctly
Note the system setup when failure occured
Automate it
Write a test
For repetitve tasks
Simulation
stimulating the failure (good) and simulating the failure (not good).
Simulating the conditions that stimulate the failure is okay. But try to avoid simulating the failure mechanism itself.
Automation can make an intermittent problem happen much more quickly
Amplification can make a subtle problem much more obvious,
intermittent bugs
you don't know exactly how you made it fail. You know exactly what you did, but you don't know all of the exact conditions. There were other factors that you didn't notice or couldn't control
If you can get control of all those conditions, you will be able to make it happen all the time.
is to forget about the assumptions and make it fail in the presence of the engineer.
-
In cases where you guess at the failure mechanism, simulation is often unsuccessful.
don't try to create new ones. Use instrumentation to look at what's going wrong but don't change the mechanism; that's what's causing the failure.
If a bug can be re−created on more than one system, you can characterize it as a design bug—it's not just the one system that's broken in some way
Being able to re−create it on some configurations and not on others helps you narrow down the possible causes.
But if you can't re−create it quickly, don't start modifying your simulation to get it to happen.
When you have a system that fails in any kind of regular manner, even intermittently, go after the problem on that system in that configuration.
Bug on customer site
The red flag to watch out for is substituting a seemingly identical environment and expecting it to fail in the same way. It's not identical.
Cannot control all conditions
First of all, figure out what they are.
In software, look for uninitialized data (tsk, tsk!), random data input, timing variations, multithread synchronization, and outside devices (like the phone network or the six thousand kids clicking on your Web site)
Sometimes you'll find that controlling a condition makes the problem go away. You've discovered something—what condition, when random, is causing the failure.
you want to try every possible value of that condition until you hit the one that causes the system to fail.
Sometimes you'll find that you can't really control a condition, but you can make it more random
If the problem is intermittent because the failure is caused by a low−likelihood event, then making the condition more random increases the likelihood of these events.
Watch out that the amplified condition isn't just causing a new error
You have to be able to look at the failure. If it doesn't happen every time, you have to look at it each time it fails, while ignoring the many times it doesn't fail. The key is to capture information on every run so you can look at it after you know that it's failed. Do this by having the system output as much information as possible while it's running and recording this information in a "debug log" file.
you can easily compare a bad run to a good one
When failures are random, you probably can't take enough statistical samples
it's far better to find a sequence of events that always goes with the failure—even if the sequence itself is intermittent, when it happens, you get 100 percent failure.