The Problem

Whatever it is you're trying to solve. The stimulus for your current efforts. The answer to "Why are you doing that?"

Related to coding. In baseball, you KeepYourEyeOnTheBall?. In coding, and especially debugging, you StayFocusedOnTheProblem?. This is an important, and often misunderstood, skill in debugging. There are those who habitually stay focused on the problem, are good debuggers, and don't realize that there are people who aren't the same way; and there are those who stay focused on finishing whatever it is they're doing, and get side-tracked when debugging, and don't realize that there is a better way.

Stay focused? What in the world does that mean? This sounds nothing like what happens in real debugging... In fact, most debugging solutions arrive when you step back from the current thread, which is, half the time, not even the cause of the bug, and instead consider all the external forces (other code, users, etc) that could evoke the erroneous condition.

See also SpecificAndGeneralProblemSolving