Source: Teaching Talk: Helping Students Who Procrastinate (Tim Pychyl) – YouTube

Devon H. O’Dell

Software developers spend 35-50 percent of their time validating and debugging software.¹ The cost of debugging, testing, and verification is estimated to account for 50-75 percent of the total budget of software development projects, amounting to more than $100 billion annually.¹¹ While tools, languages, and environments have reduced the time spent on individual debugging tasks, they have not significantly reduced the total time spent debugging, nor the cost of doing so. Therefore, a hyperfocus on elimination of bugs during development is counterproductive; programmers should instead embrace debugging as an exercise in problem solving.

It is more appropriate for programmers to focus their efforts on acquiring and encouraging effective learning strategies that reduce the time spent debugging, as well as changing the way they perceive the challenge. This article describes how effective problem-solving skills can be learned, taught, and mentored through applying research on the psychology of problem solving, conducted by Stanford’s Carol Dweck and others.

Source: The Debugging Mindset – ACM Queue