Has anyone here ever debugged a program you couldn't run? It's liberating. You spend hours using your brain, combing lines of code, tracing execution, taking notes. It's similar to writing an algorithm in a job interview; will this code really work? What kind of problems might occur? Hmm, better fix this part and check again.

Rarely, but sometimes, i'll encounter a problem and troubleshoot it, and each time I find a bug and fix it, it turns out it was completely unrelated to my problem. Looking hard at the code just makes potential bugs pop up that I hadn't seen before.

It's cases like these that made me realize the iterative software development model of write, test, debug, repeat, was a huge waste of time. If I actually review all my code I catch bugs quicker.