Binary search for bugs

I recently encountered a build failure in a dependency of a Rust crate I was trying to install which led me to be introduced to a git command called bisect.

From the official docs found over at git-scm.com, the small description under the name heading reads:

Use binary search to find the commit that introduced a bug

Sounds super cool right? Using this feature I was able to track down the commit that introduced the bug in less than 6 steps.

Here’s a general overview of how this command works:

1. Run git bisect start to start the bisect session

2. Specify a bad commit (usually HEAD) using git bisect bad <commit-id>

3. Specify a good commit using git bisect good <commit-id>

This will kick off the binary search and pick a new commit in which you can evaluate using git bisect good or git bisect bad, in between the two endpoints.

It is clear that using this method, over the linear scan approach, can save a tremendous amount of time in the quest for finding where a breaking change was introduced.