Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

10 Corollaries of Murphy’s Law: Debugging

analysis
Jul 19, 20071 min

The debugging tool you need will not be installed on any computer that exhibits the problem. There will be no way to reproduce the problem on the developer's computer. Proxies, firewalls and NAT boxes will keep you from being able to connect to any computer that exhibits the problem. If you are debugging a Web service client, the service will go down as soon as you have your tools running. Any debugging to

    It's DeBUG
    The debugging tool you need will not be installed on any computer that exhibits the problem.
  1. There will be no way to reproduce the problem on the developer’s computer.
  2. Proxies, firewalls and NAT boxes will keep you from being able to connect to any computer that exhibits the problem.
  3. If you are debugging a Web service client, the service will go down as soon as you have your tools running.
  4. Any debugging tool licenses you have will expire before you really need them.
  5. If two debugging tools use the same DLL, they will require different and incompatible versions of the DLL.
  6. The most revealing trace log statement you write will never be called.
  7. The least useful trace log statement you write will be called thousands of times.
  8. Any trace logs generated will be too large for your email server to accept.
  9. The problem will not be where you’re looking, because you’re looking in the wrong place.
Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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