Hmm, you seem to know more about the subject than I do, or perhaps I did not really understand your question. In addition, I do not know if what I'm going to say is useful or relevant. But I would still submit that, in my opinion, debugging and testing are two distinct activities, aimed at different purposes. Testing is aimed at checking that the result of your program is correct, while debugging is aimed at understanding why the result is not what you expect.

Having said that, I am doing quite often something completely different. Very often, the first thing I am doing with a new (or modified) program is to run it under the debugger, in order to verify that variables are populated with what I expect, that the data structure has the right format, that the program is folloging the expected path, etc. But that's just a short cut th get quicker to the result.

But the crux of the matter is still that testing and debugging are two very different activities.

In the end,