Debugging code is an essential skill for developers to hone. We asked industry experts to share one piece of advice for effectively debugging code—and their go-to method for identifying and resolving issues. From understanding the problem to testing assumptions, these insights will help programmers tackle bugs with confidence and precision.
- Understand Before Fixing
- Narrow Down the Problem
- Reproduce and Simplify the Bug
- Debug Like a Detective
- Map Issues Across Multiple Dimensions
- Test Your Assumptions First
Expert Advice for Resolving Code Issues
Understand Before Fixing
Let me start with a reality check: Software bugs are inevitable. No matter how carefully you design/code your system, bugs will show up either in your test environment or in production. That’s where bug tracking tools come in handy; they help you identify, manage, and resolve these issues efficiently, ensuring that you can maintain smooth operations.
One of the essential skills to date for any software engineer is the ability to debug and dig deeper into the code/functionality to understand the root cause of the issue to mitigate and resolve it fully.
As an engineering manager with 17+ years of experience at Microsoft, here are a few pieces of advice for effectively debugging code:
- Clear understanding of code/functionality: Successful debugging starts only when you have a clear understanding of the simple/complex distributed system. Instead of rushing to fix the issue, take time to understand the root cause first and thoroughly check all use cases before fixing it.
- Break the issue into smaller pieces: It’s always daunting to find the issue inside a complex distributed system. However, if you can break it down into smaller areas by leveraging logging, breakpoints, it’s easier to isolate and find the exact component/file/method causing it.
- Not all environments are the same: Often we see production environments are different from testing; hence, this new bug surfaced only in production. In that case, pay closer attention to monitoring tools and the logs they generate. Why? As it’s difficult to reproduce the issue. You can get dumps generated, and there are a lot of tools/IDEs to help you replay the issue locally by passing dumps. This makes it easy to reproduce and understand the root cause.
- Familiarity with IDEs/Tools: Technology or coding language doesn’t matter; at the end of the day, which IDE/Tools you are using matters. For example, Visual Studio/Visual Studio Code is used for developing enterprise-ready applications, and the ability to debug the functionality with watches and breakpoints makes it super easy for any developer to live debug the issue and observe the root cause.
In my long career, these are go-to methods which have helped me:
- Be proactive and do unit/integration testing to identify issues earlier.
- Utilize Observability/Monitoring tools to watch out for abnormalities.
- Always have automation to alert for any abnormal behavior.
- Utilize containers to avoid the “it works on my machine” phrase. Containers help in making all environments the same.
- Master one tool/IDE to live debug when you are not sure of the issue.
By following these, it will help you become a great SDE with good debugging skills.
Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukuri
Principal Software Engineering Manager, Microsoft
Narrow Down the Problem
The most effective way to debug is to narrow the problem down to the smallest piece of code that still reproduces the issue. This reduces noise and helps reveal the root cause. Double-check everything, even the parts you’re sure are correct — bugs often hide in the obvious. Explain the problem out loud, even to a rubber duck — articulating it clearly can surface insights you missed.
And don’t hesitate to ask a colleague for a second look — a fresh perspective often makes all the difference. Debugging is part detective work, part humility.
Artyom Zankevich
Head of Web Development, Akveo
Reproduce and Simplify the Bug
One solid piece of advice: Always try to reproduce the bug in the simplest possible scenario first. Stripping it down to the smallest failing case removes distractions and usually makes the root cause obvious.
A go-to method starts with:
1. Reproduce the issue consistently.
2. Check logs and error messages (don’t ignore stack traces — they often point exactly where to look).
3. Add temporary print/debug statements to trace logic and variable states.
4. If needed, use a debugger to step through the code line-by-line.
Vipul Mehta
Co-Founder & CTO, WeblineGlobal
Debug Like a Detective
Always reproduce the bug first, then narrow it down systematically. Too many developers start making changes without understanding what’s actually broken. When our PDF conversion tool started producing corrupted files for specific customer uploads, my first instinct was to dive into the rendering code and start tweaking parameters.
I forced myself not to quit, but to duplicate exactly the circumstances of my failure. I saved the problem files, mirrored the customer’s environment options, and did the conversion in the same way. Within half an hour or so, I realized that the issue was only with PDF files of size > 50 MB and which had embedded fonts. This discovery pointed me to a bug, a memory allocation bug, in our font processing pipeline.
Things really started to change when I began thinking of debugging as detective work rather than just guessing. I now spend approximately 30 percent of my time on making the plane fly and 70 percent with things that I didn’t understand or were just not actionable. The methodology consists of preparing a minimal test case for the bug, in order to reproduce it in the most thin and understandable way and to then proceed with excluding paths to code responsible for the bug. Treat the cause, not the effect.
Cameron Rimington
Founder & CEO, Iron Software
Map Issues Across Multiple Dimensions
My debugging approach stems from three decades of solving “impossible” problems — from writing software for two-thirds of the world’s workstation market to cracking software-defined memory that everyone said couldn’t be done. When code breaks, I employ what I call “distributed debugging” — isolating the problem across multiple theoretical layers simultaneously.
Instead of linear debugging, I map the issue across three dimensions: the mathematical theory underlying the code, the actual implementation, and the hardware interaction. When we were developing Kove:SDM™, we encountered memory allocation failures that seemed random until I realized the bug wasn’t in our code — it was in our assumptions about how distributed hash tables behaved under extreme loads.
My concrete method: write a simple test that proves your core assumption is wrong, then work backwards from there. With our 65 patents, most breakthroughs came from finding that the “bug” was actually revealing a deeper architectural truth we’d missed.
The key insight from 15 years building SDM: the most persistent bugs aren’t coding errors, they’re conceptual errors. Debug your mental model first, then debug your code.
John Overton
CEO, Kove
Test Your Assumptions First
Debug your assumptions before the code.
Before assuming there’s a problem with the code, go back to the assumptions you made about inputs, dependencies, or even user behavior. The first debugging system should involve asking questions like: “What do we believe to be true about this system?” “What do we expect this input to be doing?” and “What would break if our assumptions are wrong?”
That’s why our go-to method is running a sanity check. This is done by reproducing the bug in a minimal environment, checking the logs and inputs to double-check that there is actual data to support our assumptions. We then add one hypothesis-based debug at a time to see where the error is. If we end up getting stuck, one way for the gap in logic to surface is by explaining the bug out loud or even in writing.
By doing the above, debugging becomes a way to test your expectations of the system against reality, instead of just looking for random errors. Most bugs end up being a problem of what we thought they should do, and what they actually do.
Apoorva Govind
CEO and Founder, Bestever
