Master Debugging in IntelliJ

There’s one comment I read the other day I found hilarious and so true at the same time:

“Developer’s daily job is to write bugs and debug them.”

Especially as backend developers, the bugs we encounter are often not as straightforward as frontend developers. We usually need to trace the variable values and method flow to see what’s happening under the hood, which makes debugging a necessary skill to grasp.

In this article, we will see how IntelliJ provides us with debugging options and how we can utilize them.

Breakpoints and Debug mode

Before running the program in debug mode, we got to put some breakpoints during executions (the little red circles in the image).

Breakpoints are special markers that suspend program execution at a specific point.

I suggest you place a few (instead of 1) breakpoints at important locations to help you break down the program.

Then we are ready to run the application using debug mode. The program will suspend at the first breakpoint we created.