Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging

by Andreas Zeller

Testing can only show the presence of defects, but never their absence.

The issue of debugging is thus to identify the infection chain, to find its root cause (the defect), and to remove the defect such that the failure no longer occurs.

Some defects cannot be attributed to a specific location in the software, but rather to its overall design or architecture. I call such defects flaws.