Who coined the phrase debugging?

Answer 1

It is not known whether any one person is attributed to first use the term. The following extracts from Wikipedia may illustrate more:

"The term "bug" was used in an account by computer pioneer Grace Hopper, who publicized the cause of a malfunction in an early electromechanical computer.[6] A typical version of the story is given by this quote:[7]

In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. Operators traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term bug. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. Stemming from the first bug, today we call errors or glitch's [sic] in a program a bug.

Hopper was not actually the one who found the insect, as she readily acknowledged. The date in the log book was 9 September 1947,[8][9] although sometimes erroneously reported as 1945.[10] The operators who did find it, including William "Bill" Burke, later of the Naval Weapons Laboratory, Dahlgren, Virginia,[11] were familiar with the engineering term and, amused, kept the insect with the notation "First actual case of bug being found." Hopper loved to recount the story.[12] This log book is on display in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, complete with moth attached.[9]

While it is certain that the Harvard Mark II operators did not coin the term "bug", it has been suggested that they did coin the related term, "debug". Even this is unlikely, since the Oxford English Dictionaryentry for "debug" contains a use of "debugging" in the context of air-plane engines in 1945. See:debugging."

Answer 2

The term "debugging" is credited to Grace Hopper, a computer scientist and Navy rear admiral. In 1947, she removed a moth from a computer relay and jokingly referred to the act as "debugging" the system, thus giving rise to the term in the context of fixing technical issues.