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| (programming) | debugging - The process of attempting to determine the cause
of the symptoms of malfunctions in a program or other system.
These symptoms may be detected during testing or use by real
users.
Symptoms are often caused by factors outside the program, such
as misconfiguration of the user's operating system,
misunderstanding by the user (see PEBCAK) or failures in
other external systems on which the program relies. Some of
these are more in the realm of technical support but need to
be eliminated. Debugging really starts when it has been
established that the program is not behaving according to its
specification (which may be formal or informal). It can be
done by visual inspection of the source code, debugging by printf or using a debugger. The result may be that the
program is actually behaving as specified but that the spec is
wrong or the requirements on which it was based were deficient
in some way (see BAD).
Once a bug has been identified and a fix applied, the program
must be tested to determine whether the bug is really fixed
and what effects the changes have had on other aspects of the
program's operation (see regression testing).
The term is said to have been coined by Grace Hopper, based
on the term "bug". | |
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