I’ve worked with many developers in the past year so far, and to my amazement, none of them have the ability to properly debug an application or a stored procedure. The #1 technique for these devs is to put in a series of messages such as “echo test” or “document.write(test)”, etc, which isn’t completely bad, but it’s at many times, inefficient.

I’ve interviewed people with these lengthy resumes that specialize in many types of languages, but in their actual practice, when I observe their debugging processes, they never use a step debugger.

Whether it be in mySQL, Oracle, PHP, etc, I always end up showing them how to use one. You would not believe their amazement when they see the code run through, line at a time with the variables exposed in the data window ready for examination.

Anyways, if you interview with me, that will be the first question I will ask, “Explain to me the tools and methods you use to debug your applications.”

What I hope to expect:
- The usage of test cases
- Using a step through debugger (breakpoints, trace stack, etc)
- The common method: writing to log files, displaying variables in output

And a complete sidenote:

How can someone with 5 years of Oracle dev experience not know how to work with CLOBs?