What is debugging? What is a debugger?

First of all, let's explain what does it mean by 'a bug' in a computer program. A bug is an unknown error in the program that results in unexpected and undesired results during the program execution. Debugging is a process of discovering and removing these bugs from the program. Debugging has always been one of the most difficult parts of the overall program development life cycle. Why? Simply because the bugs are naughty creatures! In most of the cases, it is difficult to find what the exact reason for the particular bug is? Which code part exactly is responsible for the bug? It is not unusual to have the unusual behavior in one project while the buggy code is finally found in some other project. What software developers require is a utility program that helps them in finding and removing bugs from the program. This is where the debugger comes!

A debugger is a software utility program that helps developer identifying and removing the bugs from the program. A debugger attaches itself to the program at runtime and provides you the information regarding runtime state of the program, values of its variables and things like that. You can specify at which point (line of code) you want to see the values of different variables in the program, if the program control ever reaches this line during the execution of the program. These points are called break points.

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