Program Design and Debugging

This lecture showcases several debugging strategies applied to bugs added to the "Pokemon" program from lab. Students in the live lecture contributed several bugs and we walked through strategies for finding them. In particular, we focused on the following strategies:

Running the program and unit tests to find bugs
Using assertions to detect bugs earlier
Comparing program output to the sample correct file using the VS code diff tool
Using print statements to understand what the program is doing
Using a debugger to inspect variables and memory
Using a visual debugger to step through the program and find bugs
Using a debugger to track down the source of a segmentation fault or failed assertion
Setting conditional breakpoints to stop the program when a certain condition is met

These strategies are particularly helpful for more complex programs like the project 3 Euchre game.

Because this lecture is not available ahead of time, I've extended the participation deadline until Friday, May 30 at 11:59pm.

Updated Spring 2025

1: Debugging Demo

1.1 Not Started

Apologies for the abrupt end to the video - the lecture capture system cuts off a couple minutes early. The remaining part was just taking a look at the specific situation after setting the conditional breakpoint to identify the bug.

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