3 Useful tips for back end debugging

Creating software is the easy part; debugging is the tricky bit. According to most estimations, we can say that developers spend 35-50% of their time debugging and validating software. 

Debugging skills are essential for backend developers, but they are challenging to develop. Why? While you can take academic courses to learn application design, syntax, and programming languages, when it comes to defect-finding skills, the closest skill you can acquire is knowledge of debugging tools like Chrome DevTools, WebStorm, and Node.js Inspector. Interestingly, when even up to 57-70% of the total budget of a software development project is spent on debugging, testing and verification, there is no formal internship to learn debugging. As a backend developer, you learn it on your own. And with experience, you optimize your approach to spend more time innovating and writing code and less time fixing bugs.

Finding the bug

What’s debugging? Is it adding or deleting code? Or is it logging all the errors? Well, interestingly, none of these are pre-requisites for competent debugging skills. It has everything to do with your thinking. Rather than typing, you have to analyze your code and think about what went wrong.

The old-school mind mapping technique requires you to create a hypothesis of what might be wrong with the code, which is the easiest way to find bugs. It would help if you tried to narrow down the bug as much as possible by changing inputs like file sizes and user inputs, using different browsers, and commenting on the parts of the code. While testing your hypothesis, you start with the most probable reason first.

It will help you find the bug’s location quickly. If you doubt the site, you can divide and conquer. The approach here is to divide the codebase in half and go through logs to see if the bug is in the first half or second. Then divide the problematic part into two halves, and repeat until you locate the bug in a few lines of code.

Expand your tech stack wisely 

Tech stacks are a good starting point to get projects up and running, but do you always need the full stack to build an application? In backend development, the fewer technologies used, the better. Being a competent developer is more about using the tools available to the full extent, trying to avoid dependency on additional tools or frameworks as much as possible.

For instance, if you want to use the StringUtils class in your Java application, you don’t need to add a new framework to the stack; instead, you can use import org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils; to import the functionality.

There must be a clearly defined purpose and careful consideration of the impact adding a new framework or language will have on the software.

If you add dependencies in the tech stack without considering the impact, it can be miserable. Many library conflicts, incompatibilities, and security threats arise because of frameworks or transitive dependencies. It is why the lesser the dependencies, the fewer the bugs.

Automate system configuration and installation

How do you design the software to be deployed to new servers? Are they easy to install on a new server? If you are not automating the configuration files, the software will require manual installation. Over time, the software will evolve to new versions, but the manual installation instructions might become incompatible with these updates. Ultimately, you will spend much more time installing the application than you should.

It would help if you learned to use containerization to get applications up and running with minimal effort and zero configuration. Containerization is application-level virtualization. RedHat defines it as “the packaging of software code with all its necessary components like libraries, frameworks, and other dependencies so that they are isolated in their container.”

Backend developers must focus on creating self-contained systems. It lowers the risks of running into issues due to different versions or incompatibility between languages, frameworks, and operating systems.

Make it easier to replicate issues 

Replicating the issue a customer faces is the hardest step of the debugging process. The problems that may take minutes to patch can often take hours to replicate. As a backend developer, you should design systems to make it easier to reproduce issues.

Developers working with the system you design should be able to replicate issues faced by customers quickly. It would help if you made it simpler to configure the application without breaking things to make it happen.  

For instance, you should make tools available to allow other developers to quickly import from the production database. When a customer complains about an issue, a developer will need data to replicate the problem. It is infeasible to import the entire production database. Debugging gets easier when tools are available to pull a few required records from the production database in order to simulate the error.

Conclusion

Backend developers ensure ease of use, configuration simplicity, and easy debugging. We hope you will follow these recommendations to design systems that are easy to debug. Talent500 is a platform for talented backend developers to find jobs at Fortune 500 companies. Sign up today.