The Role of Debuggers in Software Development
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Debugging is a systematic process of locating and reducing the number of bugs, or defects in computer software or an electronic hardware. This makes the program operate as desired. However, debugging sometimes tends to be harder in software product development owing to the tightly coupled subsystems. When there are changes made to a particular subsystem, it causes bugs to emerge in another.
Debuggers play a key role in software and development of applications. Whether it is for the Windows platform or UNIX, offshore software development always rely on debuggers to sort out bug problems in the overall development of software.
Debuggers play a key role to locate bugs in the online software development scenario. It enables the programmer to monitor program execution, end it, re-start the program, set appropriate breakpoints as well as change values in memory and sometimes go back to the first line of code.
Although debugging is a tiresome and lengthy task, debugging skills and tools play a key role in debugging a problem. The debugging skill of the programmer is the biggest factor, but tools also play a key part. The programmer’s experiences with debugging vary greatly with the programming language in use and the tools available, also called as debuggers.
For high-level programming languages like JAVA, debugging is an easy task, because it supports exception handling. The exception handling procedure ensures finding and fixing bugs quickly. But, for lower level languages like C or C++, bugs may be responsible for causing silent problems including memory corruption. In an attempt to solve bug problems for assembly languages in UNIX and Unix-like systems, developers created the ups debugger.
The Ups debugger is an open source-level debugging tool that was developed in the 1980s by Mark Russell for the UNIX platform. It supports assembly languages like C and C++ and FORTRAN. The Ups debugger was boon for a custom software development company as it was self-contained, unlike other popular debugger tools. It runs under X Window System and SunView and currently systems are Solaris on SPARC and GNU/Linux on Intel x86.
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