Ability of a system to make defects and undesired behaviors easy to diagnose and localize in development, test, and production environments.
Debuggability focuses on shortening time-to-diagnosis and reducing the effort to pinpoint root causes. It is closely related to but distinct from:
- Observability: raw signals (logs, metrics, traces) vs. using those signals effectively to debug
- Testability: how easily a system can be tested vs. how easily failures can be diagnosed
- Analysability: impact/change assessment; debuggability emphasizes incident and defect diagnosis
Typical enablers:
- High-quality logs with context, identifiers, and correlation
- Tracing across service boundaries; consistent request IDs
- Actionable error messages and failure signatures
- Reproducibility aids: feature flags, deterministic modes, seedable randomness
- Safe debug access in production-like environments (guarded, auditable)
- Diagnostics: memory/thread dumps, heap profiles, event timelines
Outcomes
- Faster incident resolution and MTTR
- Lower debugging effort during development and operations
- Better knowledge capture through clear diagnostics