toring others, it is vital to be curious. Many paths exist to arrive at some knowledge, and your own intrinsic views are not always the best for everybody. When learning, people want to relate new knowledge to existing knowledge; this gives them a strong foundation upon which to build. Curiosity is about being open to ideas, solutions, and methods of thinking that do not necessarily reflect your own views. You must teach from the perspective of those you wish to educate.

A General Approach to Debugging

Through continued learning, malleable views of problems, and effective use of tools, you can become successful in debugging. Still, some insist that debugging is more of an art than a science. I think we can dispatch this idea entirely. It is clear that debugging requires learning, and the scientific method is specifically designed to yield new knowledge. The method, summarized: ( 1) Develop a general theory of the problem. ( 2) Ask questions leading to a hypothesis. ( 3) Form a hypothesis. ( 4) Gather and test data against the hypothesis. ( 5) Repeat.

In my experience, very little attention is paid to the formation of a hypothesis, resulting in a wasted effort, testing without any theory pertaining to the cause of the bug. Forming a good hypothesis is rather more difficult than it would seem. In practice, hypotheses are poorly formed, and many rely more on intuition than information gathering. Intuition can be an effective strategy for debugging but requires extensive experience and, when used as the only strategy, leaves the programmer unprepared to handle new, unfamiliar bugs. Lacking a framework for solving these bugs is particularly damaging for entity theorists.

A good hypothesis describes a problem and is both testable and falsifiable. In fact, forming a proper hypothesis almost always implies that a bug is fully understood. Consider the following three statements:

˲ A bug exists in the logging module.

˲ A race condition exists in the logging module when concurrent log producers enqueue the same item.

˲ A race condition between concur-
rent log producers consuming pooled
work objects is caused by an improper-
sistent feedback may simply be a func-
tional equivalent.

Most examples of such feedback fall into framing information in a way that promotes growth-oriented goals. When a colleague solves a particularly nasty bug, people tend to say, “You’re brilliant!” Instead they should say, “Great job on the hard work!” If you task engineers with work that is very easy for them to solve, you can be apologetic: “I’m sorry for assigning you a task you couldn’t learn much from.” Try to direct more challenging work to those colleagues in the future. Students and individuals will face frustration when solving bugs. If you, your students, or your colleagues voice frustration, try to frame it in terms of what you or they can expect to learn upon completing the project.

Unfortunately, students and job candidates are generally not able to choose teachers or managers who hold such views. Because learning is best achieved when both students and teachers hold incremental theories, 14 it is crucial that organizations hire individuals possessing such views and train existing staff on the material.

Instructors and tutors possessing an entity theory are more likely to focus on helping only those they perceive to be the brightest, writing off the struggling students as lost causes. This is particularly unfortunate since in several studies, Dweck shows that underachieving students with a malleable mindset moving into harder problems (as happens in transitions from elementary school to middle school, or from high school to college) tend to outperform high-achieving students with an entity theory. Instructors with an entity theory are less likely to help the underper-forming students succeed.

Reinforcing Incremental
Theories for Individuals

Education is a lifelong process. As individuals, we should adopt malleable views of intelligence in daily life. There are specific ways of approaching problems that develop and reinforce a malleable view of intelligence.

Active recall. One way people may force themselves into entity-frame-work thinking is an overreliance on reference manuals and documentation.

Are the arguments to memcpy in the
order of source, destination, length; or
are they destination, source, length?
Is strstr haystack, needle; or is it
needle, haystack? Many individuals de-
velop a habit of consulting references
(such as system manuals) as soon as
the question comes up.

Active recall is a study method in which you first make a guess before looking up the solution. (This is the basis upon which study tools like flash cards are built, but it must be employed properly to be effective.) In the case of interfaces such as memcpy and strstr, write the code first: take your best guess at the argument ordering. Once you have done this, look at the reference manual to confirm whether you have done it correctly.

Segmented study. Think of the last time you spent an entire day on a marathon debugging session. Did you solve the problem? Or did you need to take a break and work on something else for a bit, perhaps going home, sleeping, then solving the problem the next day?

Engineers frequently engage in sunk-cost fallacies while debugging, expending additional effort solving a problem despite diminishing returns for the time spent. Our brains are not tuned to focus on specific tasks for hours on end. Segmented study is the idea of having one or two additional and unrelated tasks to switch to over the course of an activity. Switching gears and taking breaks are (perhaps counterintuitively) effective methods for making progress when you are stuck.

For managers, mentors, and educators, this is also true. Explicitly allow colleagues and students time to work on other problems. Students and employees will not usually ask to work on something else, so it is crucial to grant folks the time they need to process information.

Persevere. What segmented study doesn’t mean is giving up when things get difficult. You must persevere: tenacity and passion are at least as important as intelligence to both success and skill development. The most successful individuals in a field practice their craft for years at the edge of their ability. This “grit” is highly correlated with individual success factors. 4

Be curious. With sufficient experience, it becomes appropriate to mentor others. When teaching and men-