Rubber Ducky Debugging

Obtain a rubber duck.

Rubber ducky debugging. Rubber duck debugging explained imagine if you will a sneaky bug that you just cannot put your finger on. Debugging software with a rubber ducky. The reason we so love rubber duck debugging is that typically in the process of doing this you ll find your problem. Everything looks like it should work how you d expect but it doesn t.

About talk to a duck. In software engineering rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code. Beg borrow steal buy fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck bathtub variety. The rubber duck debugging method is as follows.

This gives you the benefit of having someone else help you examine your code without actually having to. Many other terms exist for this technique often involving different usually inanimate objects or pets. Rubber duck debugging a k a. Any duck will do.

Open cyberduck terminal. You made a small typo. Cyberduck is based on work by joseph weizenbaum and norbert landsteiner. Eliza a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine.

If your duck friend hasn t spotted it yet be sure to explain all the intermediate states and transitions in detail. Larger bath time ducks are preferred but keyring ducks are acceptable and can be handy to keep around. Talk with a duck. The name is a reference to a story in the book the pragmatic programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it line by line to the duck.

Rubber duck debugging is intended to cure you of the tunnel vision that programmers often fall victim to by forcing you to acknowledge and explain each piece it s as if you re looking at the code with a fresh set of eyes all over again. Your ide has been less than helpful and you ve read the suspect code top to bottom for the last 20 minutes. Place rubber duck on desk and inform it you are just going to go over some code with it if that s all right. How do i do it.

The method itself is quite simple.