Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Avoid debug builds

I think debug builds should be avoided, and here is my view on this. 

There could be below potential benefits of giving away debug builds –

1. Improved overall build time duration

2. Issue resolution & debugging is required only for release builds

3. Developers can concentrate on verifying/working on actual deliverable release bits instead of non-deliverable debug builds

About Debug builds –

1. Debug builds are generally not smoke tested

2. Binaries that have debug specific code, anyway cannot be tested for product being shipped

3. For .NET components, it is easy to debug release binaries (and generally we must avoid writing debug specific code)

4. Generally we require debugging on dev machine, so we can manually compile with debug setting and then debug (and in many cases usually trace is sufficient)

5. If needed, it is easily possible to generate debug binary for detailed debugging purpose

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