Debugging habits only matter if someone else can use them

talk
1

I’m starting to think the best debugging habit isn’t speed, it’s whether your notes still make sense two weeks later to someone who wasn’t in the room. A lot of the clever little tricks feel fine in the moment and then fall apart the second the bug gets handed off.

What habits have actually held up once a team got bigger?

2

Treat it like an incident note, not a diary entry.

I want the debug writeup to say what reproduces it, what you expected, what actually happened, and how you’ll know it’s fixed. “Clicked save on patient record, got 500, retry worked” is miles better than “it was acting weird”.

The bit people skip is the exact input. Same page, same account, same timestamp, same weird flag set — whatever matters. Without that, the next person is just poking at the thing and hoping the bug feels like showing itself again.