Rubber Ducky Debugging

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 ducky debugging.

Open cyberduck terminal. Find your stupid obvious solution. This gives you the benefit of having someone else help you examine your code without actually having to. Any duck will do.

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. The rubber duck debugging method is as follows. Rubber duck debugging explained imagine if you will a sneaky bug that you just cannot put your finger on.

Everything looks like it should work how you d expect but it doesn t. Many other terms exist for this technique often involving different usually inanimate objects or pets. 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. In software engineering rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code.

About talk to a duck. Your ide has been less than helpful and you ve read the suspect code top to bottom for the last 20 minutes. The method itself is quite simple. How do i do it.

You made a small typo. Obtain a rubber duck. If your duck friend hasn t spotted it yet be sure to explain all the intermediate states and transitions in detail. Debugging software with a rubber ducky.

Beg borrow steal buy fabricate or otherwise obtain a rubber duck bathtub variety. The reason we so love rubber duck debugging is that typically in the process of doing this you ll find your problem. Rubber ducking is an informal term used in software engineering for a method of debugging code. Don t skip details ducks love details.

Larger bath time ducks are preferred but keyring ducks are acceptable and can be handy to keep around.