Cues for Better Scent in Debugging

Rui AbreuDept. of Informatics Engineering

University of PortoPortugal

History:The birth of debugging

Your guess?

Thanks to Alex Thanks to Alex OrsoOrso

Can we do this Can we do this automatically?automatically?

Thanks to Alex Thanks to Alex OrsoOrso

Diagnostic Performance

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Are we done?•Best performing techniques still

require the tester to inspect 10% of the code...•100 LOC 10 LOC•10,000 LOC 1,000 LOC•1000,000 LOC 10,000 LOC

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Metrics•Are we measuring the right thing?•rank-based

•PDG-based

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Case Studies (NXP/PSC)

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Human studies•A. Orso et al observed that there is a

lack of:

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Why do we need human studies?

•Do developers follow the ranking?

•Does perfect bug understanding exist?•How can we quantify isolation

efforts?

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Ecosystem in need•Wide adoption will only be possible

if there is a framework which provides•testing functionalities•debugging capabilities•integrated in an IDE

Better Cues for Debugging – a Better Cues for Debugging – a frameworkframework

Check it out at www.gzoltar.orgCheck it out at www.gzoltar.org

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Interested?•Do you wanna try it out?•We are always interested in

receiving feedback•Email José Carlos Campos to

participate•jose.carlos.campos@fe.up.pt

•Thanks!

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Conclusions•History of debugging

•Spectrum-based reasoning

•Human studies

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Open Research Questions• Can we automatically decide if a test fails?

• Using program invariants• Sort of replace asserts in JUnit tests

• Can we automatically suggest fixes?• Other intuitive visualisations?• How to reduce the overall overhead?• Can we apply this principles to Web/Mobile

envs?• Self-healing: Architecture-based Run-time

fault localization (NSF project with CMU)

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