The Power of Restating Problems: A Simple Technique for Solving Complex Programming Challenges
Sometimes, simply explaining it to a colleague can lead to the solution. This technique: problem restatement, helps clarify the issue, broaden your perspective and unlock solutions.
When you work in a software development team, there are situations; when you are working on something, you can’t seem to find the solution, you tried few things, but It doesn’t seem like you can identify the issue. You step away, and you searched for one of your colleagues to ask for help, brainstorm it with the hope that he or she may get you the help you need. You walk into your colleague’s cubicle in the pre-pandemic times, or you ping them on Teams, Slack or Discord. You get into a call and start explaining the issue, and once you start describing the problem you are trying to solve, you say you know what!? Thank you very much! I am good now, you’ve solved it. This problem-solving technique is crucial and plays an essential role in our day-to-day problem-solving activities. We shouldn’t forget it because it is powerful — It rarely fails, and the more you use it, the better you become at restating problems. Whenever we face a programming challenge, one of the best things to do is examine and restate the problem. As Morgan D. Jones wrote in his book, The Thinker’s Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving, “The aim of problem restatement is to broaden our perspective of a problem, helping us to identify the central issue and alternative solutions and increase the chance that the outcome our analysis produces willfully, not partially, resolve the problem.”
When solving a coding problem.
The same goes for programming before thinking about the code. We should understand the problem clearly — restate it in multiple ways. Write it down, indicating the input and output. It could be quick, one or two minutes before writing code, but this will make a considerable impact and increase the chances of creating a great solution. It will also remove the uncertainties and avoid thinking in the wrong direction.
Conclusion
Restating a problem is a problem-solving technique that we shouldn’t underestimate. As simple as it sounds can be beneficial to everyday problem-solving activities. Either during debugging or when we are troubleshooting an issue. It is always good to take a couple of minutes and restate the problem.