In my experience Debugging is an absolutely critical skill that is *never* taught in schools. The importance of debugging lies in the fact most of the software work you do in most companies involves maintaining other people's code and not writing applications from scratch. Similar sentiments are expressed in this article quite well, see the first point: https://medium.com/@cramforce/ive-lately-been-thinking-about-what-patterns-could-explain-perceived-differences-in-productivity-77d1f52f1527 

Testing on the other hand depends at times on your tool sets. Dynamically typed languages (Ruby, Python, JavaScript, etc) tend to lend themselves to more rigorous testing procedures, some of which could be avoided with the use of statically typed languages (C++, JAVA, C#, Erlang, Go, etc). It is said that a compiler takes care of a fairly large amount of errors that can only be detected at runtime when using language interpreters, hence the need for carrying out automated test suites in those cases.

Hope I haven't veered off point too much?

Martin.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 6:04 PM, John K. via skunkworks <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:

I guess context matters. If it's a brand new system, then you probably need dev's with experience and who can design the new system with all the client's current and future requirements in mind. If you need devs to integrate with a variety of systems (esp. old legacy enterprise systems), then maybe you need dev's with experience with various  environments, systems, hardware etc. Where the ability to see multiple angles of a certain problem are more valuable than being able to design the perfect interface.

Then again, I'm just typing off the top of my head so maybe I'm completely way off.

Regards,

John K.

On 30 March 2015 at 15:59, Francis Njenga via skunkworks <skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke> wrote:

Hi!

Found myself wondering, would "Strong Debugging Skills" on job requirements mean you

need firefighters(maintenance oriented devs) vis-a-vis "Strong Testing Skills" that you need

software designers(build it from the bottoms up... right, devs).

Does the language used imply what you are required to do, or is it just an indication of the

kind of the boss or HR Department you'll be dealing with.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kore Francis Njenga,

IT Consultant & Software Developer,

Indra
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Running and Walking are only breaths apart.

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