"As soon as we started programming, we found out to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." (Maurice Wilkes, 1949)
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" (Brian W Kernighan & Phillip J Plauger, "The Elements of Programming Style", 1974)
"When the operation to be done is more complex, write a separate subroutine or function. The ease of later comprehending, debugging, and changing the program will more than compensate for any overhead caused by adding the extra modules." (Brian W Kernighan & Phillip J Plauger, "The Elements of Programming Style", 1974)
"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." (Brian Kernighan, "Unix for Beginners", 1979)
"Testing proves a programmer’s failure. Debugging is the programmer’s vindication." (Boris Beizer, "Software Testing Techniques", 1990)
"Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."
"People also underestimate the time they spend debugging. They underestimate how much time they can spend chasing a long bug. With testing, I know straight away when I added a bug. That lets me fix the bug immediately, before it can crawl off and hide. There are few things more frustrating or time wasting than debugging. Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot quicker if we just didn't create the bugs in the first place?" (Martin Fowler, 2002)
"For some reason software developers don’t think of debugging time as coding time. They think of debugging time as a call of nature, something that just has to be done. But debugging time is just as expensive to the business as coding time is, and therefore anything we can do to avoid or diminish it is good." (Robert C Martin, "The Clean Coder: A code of conduct for professional programmers", 2011)
"Continuous deployment is but one of many powerful tools at your disposal for increasing iteration speed. Other options include investing in time-saving tools, improving your debugging loops, mastering your programming workflows, and, more generally, removing any bottlenecks that you identify."
"Debugging is known as an open-ended sort of activity, and even seasoned programmers expect variable completion times when faced with this type of task."
"It’s wishful thinking to believe that all the code we write will be bug-free and work the first time. In actuality, much of our engineering time is spent either debugging issues or validating that what we’re building behaves as expected. The sooner we internalize this reality, the sooner we will start to consciously invest in our iteration speed in debugging and validation loops." (Edmond Lau, "The Effective Engineer: How to Leverage Your Efforts In Software Engineering to Make a Disproportionate and Meaningful Impact", 2015)
