The trusty old bug has been the bane of software developers and engineers for more than 140 years. Yes, you read that right. It was in fact Thomas Edison that coined the term "bug" in the late 1870s. It appeared in many of his notebook entries where he describes for example that the incandescent lightbulb still had many "bugs left".

His efforts to debug his inventions are quite legendary. Consider the true grit and determination it took for a man already in his mid-sixties to work 112-hour working weeks. He and his seven-person team (it is a common misconception that there were only six because the seventh member didn't appear in the group photograph) became known as the insomnia squad during a 5-week stint that resulted in very little sleep.

These days, thanks to the advances of technology, software developers have a vast array of debugging tools (inside and outside of Visual Studio) at their disposal. So does debugging really matter? Of course it does. It is part of what we as software developers do. If we don't debug, well, here are some examples:

• In 2004, the Electronic Data Systems (EDS) child support system in the UK overpaid almost 2 million people, while underpaying almost a million, and resulted in billions of dollars in uncollected child support payments. The incompatibility between EDS and another system it relied on resulted in taxpayers losing money and negatively affecting the lives of so many single parents.
• The initial release of Apple Maps in 2012. Enough said. While bemusing for many, I still find myself using Google Maps for turn-by-turn directions when in an unfamiliar city or area.
• The Therac-25 radiation therapy machine used electrons to target tumors in patients. Unfortunately, a race condition in the software caused the machine to deliver lethal overdoses of radiation in several patients.

Examples of software bugs affecting the lives of millions of people can be found all over the Internet. We're not simply talking about the run-of-the-mill bugs either. Sometimes, we're faced with seemingly insurmountable issues. It is the comfort of knowing how to use some of the tools available that makes the difference between a stable application and one that is totally unusable.