Program debugging using COBOL '74
George N. Baird · 1975
The testing and checkout of production software often consumes upwards of 50 percent of the effort that goes into the development of the system. The absence in most programming languages of language elements specifically defined for debugging programs contributes to the time and effort involved in the checkout of systems due to programmers having to use various techniques to improvise debugging code. This was especially true of the 1968 COBOL Standard in that there were no language elements dedicated to the debugging and proving correctness of programs.