While this chapter might be titled Debugging and Benchmarking, I've often found that one of the best ways to debug your codebases is to build up a range of integration tests that cover as much of your codebase as is practical. We'll begin by looking at the main reason as to why we test our code bases.
So, we've gotten roughly halfway through this book, and not once have we defined any sort of tests, or ensured that the programs that we have written are verifiably correct. Up until this point, you've taken my word that the programs I have shown you do everything that I've said they do. But how can we guarantee that they give us the same results every time regardless of how many changes we make to them?
This is where your testing strategy comes into play.
In professional software development, testing your software to try and limit the bugs is one of the most important things you can do. All great software developers implement a decent testing strategy surrounding...