Re: debuggers - request for information

I my, less than humble opinion, debuggers can be both a gift from on high
and a horrible mistake. They are gift when they let you look at stack
frame's during the course of your development, but they are a horrible
mistake if you become complacent and assume that the code is finished or
well tested. Neither of these is ever true.


In my experience, the time spend writing an exhaustive test suite, at least
for library type functions, is well worth it. For example, I wrote a
simple queue manager, which only had 96 lines of C code in it (more than
queueing was going on). It took 350 lines of C to exhaustively test it. I
spent 8 hours on the code, 16 hours on the test program. However, after I
was finished, I had to modify the code. During the modifications, I
created a bug that only occurred in an obscure case. The test suite caught
it immediately. The 16 hours I spent on the test code paid itself back on
the first enhancment. If I had only used a debugger during my initial
testing, to fix the obvious bugs, I would probably have spent a lot of time
using the debugger on the wrong code in the system into which the queueing
package was linked, because I would have assumed my queue code was working.


Anyway, there's my plug for test suites.


Regards,


        Lowell
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