Debugging technique: Three possible

Debugging is creative problem-solving. This is a good thing because we can look outside of software for techniques to help us!

For example, film direction. In the book Directing Actors, author Judith Weston describes the technique of “three possible”. It’s self-explanatory: if you’re stuck, generate three possible ideas. Don’t overthink them, just write down the first three things that could possibly answer the question at hand. You can use it to work on dialogue that sounds wrong, or even lines you don’t understand!

If you’re stuck, come up with three possible explanations for the bug. Then you’ll have some things to test, experiment with, or review with someone else for an outside perspective.

Have you used techniques from other fields and applied them to debugging? What were they?