Debugging Hints and Advice

[under construction]

Logic Bugs

Logic bugs are the kinds of bugs where your code runs successfully, but the output was not what you expected. These tips are mainly about logic bugs, since for other types of bugs like syntax errors, you can find information about those on sites like http://stackoverflow.com/>Stack Overflow. This is supposed to be general advice, but any examples will be provided in Python.

Some of these tips were adapted from the following sources:
Debugging for Beginners
Debugging 101
Debugging Logic Errors (ppt) maybe put a link to those couple of sites
isolate down to the problematic data, break into smaller testing sets if necessary, no need to run on full set each time
remember to check the data since it is real-world data and may not be perfect
write and test your code in small pieces as you go
maybe even do unit tests tho that's usually overkill for us
an actual debugger is also usually overkill. just do print-debug
put a few examples
variable values at different steps, your data changing at different steps, find out where things break