This is really about good record-keeping habits.

Q: It seems that ... I can't get through more than 15 minutes of work without someone interrupting me, and then I lose my train of thought.

...

A: What you really want is a way to remember what you were doing when you were doing it, and debugging is one of the best examples of this. Nothing is more annoying than to come back to a problem you were working on and not remember what you had already tried.

Real scientists, as opposed to lame hacks who claim to be scientists, know how to formulate ideas - called hypotheses - and test them. They write down each hypothesis, then describe the experiment and the results. They keep all of this data in logbooks or notebooks.

Just because your test passes or your code doesn't crash doesn't mean that you have completed your debugging.