“Find The Bug” tips
In Chapter 2, Adam Burr suggests a few things you could do while walking through code. An interesting method he identifies as a way for programmers to find bugs in their code is “inspeculation”, which is the mixture of “inspection”, “simulation” and “speculation.” Barr says: “In other words [programmers] either go away and think about something else for a while, or else spend a lot of time reading through the code and thinking about it, possibly hand-stimulating an execution run.” Instead of stimulating the run of the code and monitoring the execution, the programmer thinks about the program.
The following list contains the steps to aid in the process of inspeculation. Barr goes into more detail of each step later in the chapter.
Split the code into sections with goals.
Identify the meaning of each variable.
Look for known “gotchas.”
Choose inputs for walkthroughs.
Walk through each action.