How can you handle debugging third-party software?

- Understand the scope clearly - Explain what you understood & ask if that's correct to make sure you didn't misunderstand anything. - Make clear notes of what you understood & how you can do it because if you can write something very clearly, you already finished 50% of the work. - Make sure you set proper start & finish dates including holidays, because without a deadline, any kind of task whether it's fixing any bugs, adding a new feature, or optimizing the performance can not be a part of any project or split.

The first step is understanding the scope of the issue and the stakeholders' expectations. Ask yourself if you're dealing with a bug fix, feature addition, or performance optimization. Identify who is affected, gauge the urgency, and consider project constraints and requirements. This initial clarity helps prioritize tasks, set realistic goals, and facilitates effective communication about your progress.

Start by gaining a deep understanding of the system architecture, mapping key interactions. Utilize static analysis tools to identify points of fragility. Establish close collaboration with vendors. Implement specific unit tests to validate integration. By meticulously documenting each step, you build a solid foundation for troubleshooting and optimizing performance.

Read the Documentation Understand the requirements Analyse the test cases Know its complete working Start doing small operations Go through all small steps involved in the process that is not going right.

1. I would first look for the documentation, if not available, reach out to the dev team, and ask for it. 2. List out the pre-conditions that need to be covered while debugging. A test plan may be a good choice. 3. Look for the relevant tools to optimize the debugging time, and reach out to 3rd party team, they may have already some defined tools their team is using. 4. Define the scope in as small chunks as possible to gain clarity on what module has failed/passed. 5. Generate a report and share it with the 3rd party team, and share your thoughts when unexpected behaviors are noticed, ask for resolutions, or if different ways to debug it.

Reading documentation of existing projects helps to speed up the pace of debugging third-party software. Documentation serves as a guide to the code written, and how it is implemented. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, it's far better to catch up the progress of the project, and this is possible by reading the documentation.

- Read the documentation properly, if the documentation does not exist, discuss it with the developer - Check if it includes all the technology stacks that you understand & can manage. - Check if any project dependencies are new to you & how complex it will be for you to understand it. - Check what the engine parts of the project, like for example, which are the main features of the project that can affect more than 50% or more in the project - Check if there are any vulnerabilities or suspicious code exists or not, like for example, sending the payment details on another unknown server / URL. - Check if the code follows best practices or not like, explaining the code with comments, explaining the function parameters, etc.

When debugging third-party software, the first move is to thoroughly go through the provided documentation. It offers insights into the software's architecture, functionality, usage, and any known issues. Look for examples, tutorials, or FAQs to understand the software better. If the documentation is lacking, consider reaching out to developers directly or seeking additional insights from online forums, blogs, or articles.

- Use git or similar version control system to make sure you can do try different logic or solutions, if something went wrong, you can revert back your code. - Use online repositories like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or any similar, so if something went wrong with your system, you always have a latest code available on remote repositories. - Use debuggers to inspect the code & find the errors - Use profilers to check the visuals of execution time & CPU usage of the application. - Check logs to check if there are any existing errors detected in the software - Use the test frameworks to different kind of testing to confirm the software gives expected output in every text scenarios.

To solve the problems there are many approaches Isolate the problem is indeed of the crucial step to solve the problem. We should - Isolate the problem - Take clear notes of input & output of the problem & any constraints we have - Break down the problem into smaller subproblems & then we should solve each small problems independently. This strategy also known as Divide & Conquer. - Use Test First strategy, where we use test driven development but before implement the solution, we write down the test cases. - Write the pseudocode to highlight logic and structure of the solution before writing it. - Make the diagrams of how it should work & make diagram of how it's working right now, compare it & we can visualise the problem easily.

Debugging third-party software can be challenging, but in our team, we follow a systematic approach: 1️⃣ Isolation: We isolate the issue to the third-party software by ensuring our code works as expected without it. 2️⃣ Documentation: We thoroughly review the software's documentation to understand its expected behavior. 3️⃣ Logs & Errors: We examine any logs or error messages provided by the software. 4️⃣ Community/Support: If the issue persists, we reach out to the software's community or support team for assistance. Isolation is crucial as it helps us ensure that the problem lies within the third-party software and not our own code.

- Always make sure there are no any suspicious code exist, if later that's found you could be charged as guilty. (must do it specially when there is no any version control system used). - Understand the proper project flow, how it's structured, which can will be trigger when. - If there are any issues found or there is any unclarity, don't hesitate to discuss with stockholders. - Following the proper project management tools & software development life cycle will be helpful to complete any kind complex tasks / requirements.