Stef,

One of the things that I do all of the time when trying to debug particularly difficult problems is to keep a "bug notebook".� My "bug notebook" is a text file where I record information gleaned from an inspector intermixed with comments, code and observations...

I've attached an example from a couple of days ago (bug_notebook.txt).

The particular problem I am working on involves btree nodes being improperly updated during index object updates. Each btree node is basically a 2000+ element Array ... so there is a lot of data to deal with .

In the notebook, I extract the interesting entries from the btree node and record the original set of values and then record the updated set of values and in this particular case I was able to "see" that after the update I had 4 entries that were not properly deleted ...

In addition to recording the interesting chunks of large data structures, I often end up with chunks of stacks from the debugger, copies of a inspector panes in my "bug notebooks" and chunks of code ...

Over the last several weeks I have been tackling different sets of bugs in this same area and I have been keeping a time-stamped log of the work that I've done along the way (analysis_notebook.txt) ... in this notebook I've bee recording test results and branch/SHA information so that I can easily reference different versions of methods as I work through fixing bugs and managing regressions ... There's� a section in the notebook where I've record performance information, so that when I have finished work on this set of bugs, I can evaluate how I've impacted performance ... Finally at the very bottom of the notebook, I've recorded a simple todo-list ...

The� notebooks are on a shared disk so that I can access and update the "bug notebook" when I am working from home on a mac or at work from a linux box ...�

I rely on the fact that I am working with text and not images ... since I like to copy and paste as well as search for particular strings in the data from the inspector ... in the bug_notebook� I searched for the `victim` string in the text output� from an inspector ...

I have come to really depend upon bug notebooks when addressing difficult bugs and I think that support for creating and maintaining bug notebooks would be a valuable addition the the debugging arsenal...

Dale

On 03/09/2017 10:50 AM, stepharong wrote:

Thanks you all.

The idea is that we want to see how we cn improve our debugging arsenal.�

So it is important that your scenario give use some hints.�

It is difficult to convey what we are really looking for :)

Hi guys

During the DSU workshop we were brainstorming about what are the most difficult bugs we faced and what are the conceptual tools that would have helped you.

Stef

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