Build your vocabulary of debugging verbs, idiomatic phrases, and technical expressions used when investigating and describing bugs in English.
0 / 10 completed
1 / 10
What does 'to bisect' mean in a Git debugging context?
'git bisect' uses binary search to find the commit that introduced a regression. You mark commits as 'good' or 'bad' and Git narrows down the range until it finds the culprit commit.
2 / 10
Which sentence correctly uses 'to reproduce' in a debugging context?
'To reproduce' (or 'to repro') means to make the bug happen again reliably using specific steps. 'I was able to reproduce the bug by...' is the standard formulation.
3 / 10
What does 'to narrow down' mean in debugging?
'Narrow down' means to progressively eliminate suspects until you've isolated the cause. 'I've narrowed it down to the authentication middleware' means everything else has been ruled out.
4 / 10
What does the phrase 'it works on my machine' typically imply?
'It works on my machine' is a classic engineering phrase implying environment inconsistency — the code behaves differently in development vs. staging or production due to different OS, env vars, dependencies, or data.
5 / 10
What does 'flaky test' mean?
A flaky test fails non-deterministically — sometimes it passes, sometimes it fails with no code change. Common causes: race conditions, time-dependent assertions, reliance on external APIs, or shared state between tests.
6 / 10
What does 'to instrument the code' mean?
Instrumenting code means adding observability: log statements, performance counters, traces, or metrics. 'We'll need to instrument the payment flow before we can diagnose the latency issue.'
7 / 10
Which phrase means 'to check whether a variable has the expected value at a specific point in execution'?
'To inspect' a variable means to examine its current value — in a debugger, via a print/log statement, or in a REPL. 'Let me inspect the response object to see what the API is actually returning.'
8 / 10
What does 'off-by-one error' mean?
An off-by-one (OBOE) error is a very common bug where a boundary is wrong by exactly 1 — iterating one too many or too few times, or accessing the wrong array index. Classic example: `for i in range(1, n)` when you meant `range(0, n)`.
9 / 10
What does 'to trace through' the code mean?
'Tracing through' code means following the execution path step by step — in your head, on paper, or with a debugger — to understand what actually happens at runtime. 'Let me trace through this function with the failing input.'
10 / 10
What does 'regression' mean in software testing?
A regression is when working functionality breaks after a change — code that used to work stops working. 'This commit introduced a regression in the payment flow' means the payment flow worked before this commit but not after.