debugging

[downs]

Hi:
I would like some general advice. I recently hired a computer science gad student to write some software, win32 with opengl. He spent 2 years on it and has now moved on. Unfortunately, there are some bugs in his code that I just have not been able to find. I recently sent my code to a colleague who reported compilation errors in which things like calls to functions were being made. pg call release DC(...)
I am unable to get my version of the code to give me these errors.

My question then, is there some sort of advice that you could give me on a systematic way to uncover bugs in my code. The code is about 50,000 lines long.

[Intel_C_Intel]

I'm not certain of your programming language or development platform, but in general debugging is done best by first getting an understanding of the code, making sure the variable types are well defined and there are no argument conflicts.

If you are confident the structure is okay, then use some type of bracketing technique to trap the error before it happens, and watch what the key variables do. Most compilers have some sort of debugging capability to watch the variables during execution.

Then all you need to do is apply an infinite amount of patience to find the structure problem/variable declaration error you missed the first time ;-)

Good luck,
dfh