Defensive Programming and Debugging

Who is the course for?

This is an intermediate level course aimed at people with some programming experience. Although examples will be given in C and Fortran, the principles (and most of the tools) are transferable to other programming languages.

What topics will you cover?

Defensive programming: the use of good coding style, documentation strategies and good code testing

Preventing bugs: how to use compiler flags and static code checkers to identify bugs in an early stage

Finding bugs: debugging concepts and technics

Using the debugging tools GDB and Valgrind to fix serial programs

Debugging parallel code: using Intel Inspector and ITAC

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to…

Develop good written software codes

Produce clear and useful software documentation

Identify software bugs

Solve software bugs