Defending debuggers (sort of)

I came across this post about debuggers today. I found it a lot more nuanced than the Giles Bowkett post on the same topic. The part of the post I found the most useful was when he used the issue of problems in production to advocate for two practices I’m a big fan of: test-driven development and effective logging.

I’m responsible for an app that wasn’t developed using TDD and had no logging at all when I first inherited it. When there were problems in production, we endured all manner of suffering to determine the causes and fix them. Once we added some unit tests and implemented logging in key locations (global.asax and catch blocks primarily), the number of issues we had dropped off significantly. And when there were issues, the log helped us diagnose and resolve problems far more quickly.

The other benefit of effective logging is to customer service. Once I made the contents available to a business analyst, she could see in real-time what was happening with the application and provide help to users more quickly too.

Whether you add it on after the fact or design it in from the beginning, logging is a must-have for today’s applications.

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