This. Circa 2002, I debugged a mutli-threaded Java server, by taking a hard copy of source and walking through it on paper.
A developer sitting in another office had written it; I was roped in at the moment the nasty bug was discovered, basically to have a look from a fresh set of eyes. It had to be shipped in a couple of days time.
The neat thing about writing code on paper is the amazing gain in clarity. Of course, like all approaches, it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
It seems to me that the necessity of scrolling on a Laptop screen somehow creates additional cognitive overhead, especially when we want to rapidly jump across sections of code. Perhaps, it forces us being physically away from the machine to reflect more deeply on the problem.
A developer sitting in another office had written it; I was roped in at the moment the nasty bug was discovered, basically to have a look from a fresh set of eyes. It had to be shipped in a couple of days time.
The neat thing about writing code on paper is the amazing gain in clarity. Of course, like all approaches, it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
It seems to me that the necessity of scrolling on a Laptop screen somehow creates additional cognitive overhead, especially when we want to rapidly jump across sections of code. Perhaps, it forces us being physically away from the machine to reflect more deeply on the problem.