On the Google Test Team’s blog, their “Debugging Sucks, Testing Rocks” logo recently caught my attention, and prompted me to vocalize an opinion to the contrary.  Debugging does NOT suck.  On the contrary, debugging rocks.  Rocks HARD.  Please don’t misconstrue this as a “Google vs. Microsoft” rant, nor is this meant to come across as disrespectful to any testers out there.  These are merely my thoughts on something I’m quite passionate about.

 

I’m sure there’s a feeling of accomplishment a tester gets when they find a bug.  Along those lines, there’s nothing more fulfilling for me than fixing one.  That’s where I come in.  Much like testers, an Escalation Engineer hunts for bugs.  Our tools may differ.  Our techniques couldn’t be further apart.  But the bottom line is that we’re both on the same bug-hunting quest.  Once a bug is found, however, THAT’s when the real rocking begins.  Stepping through the code, setting breakpoints, checking out the locals, parameters, returns, exceptions, debug spew, registers, assembly.  Now can you hear the guitars wailing?  Set a conditional breakpoint to validate your findings.  It works!  I think we just blew an amp!  And for the encore?  Writing the fix, building it, testing it, shipping it ... here’s my guitar pick, hope you enjoyed the show.

 

 

Rock on.

-scott