Related papers: What we can learn from how programmers debug their…

Mutation testing has been widely accepted as an approach to guide test case generation or to assess the effectiveness of test suites. Empirical studies have shown that mutants are representative of real faults; yet they also indicated a…

The validation process for microprocessors is a very complex task that consumes substantial engineering time during the design process. Bugs that degrade overall system performance, without affecting its functional correctness, are…

Patching severe security flaws in complex software remains a major challenge. While automated tools like fuzzers efficiently discover bugs, fixing deep-rooted low-level faults (e.g., use-after-free and memory corruption) still requires…

In software development, fixing bugs is an important task that is time consuming and cost-sensitive. While many approaches have been proposed to automatically detect and patch software code, the strategies are limited to a set of identified…

Unlike code completion, debugging requires localizing faults and applying targeted edits. We observe that frontier LLMs often regenerate correct but over-edited solutions during debugging. To evaluate how far LLMs are from precise…

Machine learning-based program analyses have recently shown the promise of integrating formal and probabilistic reasoning towards aiding software development. However, in the absence of large annotated corpora, training these analyses is…

Background and context: Debugging is a significant and often frustrating challenge for beginner programmers. Understanding students' debugging behaviours and strategies can help to identify common difficulties and inform approaches for…

The use of deep learning techniques has achieved significant progress for program synthesis from input-output examples. However, when the program semantics become more complex, it still remains a challenge to synthesize programs that are…

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in code generation tasks, but their performance in tackling programming problems with complex data structures and algorithms remains suboptimal. To address this issue, we propose…

Background: Developers spend a significant amount of time and efforts to localize bugs. In the literature, many researchers proposed state-of-the-art bug localization models to help developers localize bugs easily. The practitioners, on the…

Debugging represents a time-consuming and labor-intensive task in hardware design, with bug localization constituting a substantial portion of this process. While spectrum-based bug localization techniques have achieved remarkable success…

Debugging is often a challenging and infuriating experience for secondary school students learning their first text-based programming language. Many students resort to ineffective debugging strategies, making success with solving errors…

The aim is to identify faulty predicates which have strong effect on program failure. Statistical debugging techniques are amongst best methods for pinpointing defects within the program source code. However, they have some drawbacks. They…

Refactoring is a common practice in software development, aimed at improving the internal code structure in order to make it easier to understand and modify. Consequently, it is often assumed that refactoring makes the code less prone to…

A type debugger interactively detects the expressions that cause type errors. It asks users whether they intend the types of identifiers to be those that the compiler inferred. However, it seems that novice programmers often get in trouble…

As the adoption of Deep Learning (DL) systems continues to rise, an increasing number of approaches are being proposed to test these systems, localise faults within them, and repair those faults. The best attestation of effectiveness for…

Open source projects often maintain open bug repositories during development and maintenance, and the reporters often point out straightly or implicitly the reasons why bugs occur when they submit them. The comments about a bug are very…

We describe the integration of logical and uncertain reasoning methods to identify the likely source and location of software problems. To date, software engineers have had few tools for identifying the sources of error in complex software…

When a bug is detected by testing a quantum program on a quantum computer, we want to determine its location to fix it. To locate the bug, the quantum program is divided into several segments, and each segment is tested. However, to prepare…

Debugging is a crucial skill in programming education and software development, yet it is often overlooked in CS curricula. To address this, we introduce an AI-powered debugging assistant integrated into an IDE. It offers real-time support…