Systematic Debugging

When to Use

• Bug reports with unclear cause
• Errors appearing in production
• Tests failing unexpectedly
• Intermittent/flaky issues
• Complex multi-component failures

When NOT to Use

• Known issues with documented fixes already available in the codebase or runbook
• Simple typo or syntax errors that are immediately obvious from the error message
• Configuration issues where the fix is simply updating an environment variable or config value

The Four Phases