But tests show you if a bug is happening, they don’t help you understand the underlying cause of the bug. In a decade, you haven’t hit a compiler codegen issue, a silicon erratum, a race condition, or anything that required actually spending effort understanding the causal path?
replyI don't know what to tell you besides that I've found more, better bugs using comprehensive testing than I ever found with a debugger.
replyThe sole exception to that is that, back in the very early days, troubleshooting IE6 really required a debugger. But everything else, from memory leaks to thread hang issues to deadlocks, testing is better.