Topic: Teddy Bears Morph into Rubber Ducks

[Kerry]

Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else. 
This will often cause you to explain the bug to yourself. 
Sometimes it takes no more than a few sentences, followed by an embarrassed "Never mind, I see what's wrong. 
Sorry to bother you."  This works remarkably well; you can even use non-programmers as listeners. 
One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. 
Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor. 
~Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, about debugging

Now the story is
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/rubber-duck-problem-solving.html

Interesting and usefull article

[vegbruiser]

I once raised this as "Talk to the bear" in a design meeting and got laughed at;  But I firmly believe the principle is sound, if underused.

And I've done what the poster mentions as well; begun writing out a post and found the error as I was doing so.

Always good to get a reminder - thanks Kerry!

[mohnston]

So many times the answer is the question.