Related papers: Where Did My Variable Go? Poking Holes in Incomple…

Program logics typically reason about an over-approximation of program behaviour to prove the absence of bugs. Recently, program logics have been proposed that instead prove the presence of bugs by means of under-approximate reasoning,…

Logs are widely used to record runtime information of software systems, such as the timestamp and the importance of an event, the unique ID of the source of the log, and a part of the state of a task's execution. The rich information of…

A critical part of creating code suggestion systems is the pre-training of Large Language Models on vast amounts of source code and natural language text, often of questionable origin or quality. This may contribute to the presence of bugs…

The number of bug reports in complex software increases dramatically. Now bugs are triaged manually, bug triage or assignment is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Without knowledge about the structure of the software, testers often…

Large language model (LLM)-based debugging systems can generate failure explanations, but these explanations may be incomplete or incorrect. Misleading explanations are harmful for downstream tasks (e.g., bug triage, bug fixing). We…

Programmers often use an iterative process of hypothesis generation ("perhaps this function is called twice?") and hypothesis testing ("let's count how many times this breakpoint fires") to understand the behavior of unfamiliar or…

Just because software developers say they believe in "X", that does not necessarily mean that "X" is true. As shown here, there exist numerous beliefs listed in the recent Software Engineering literature which are only supported by small…

With an increasing number of value-flow properties to check, existing static program analysis still tends to have scalability issues when high precision is required. We observe that the key design flaw behind the scalability problem is that…

Backtracking (i.e., reverse execution) helps the user of a debugger to naturally think backwards along the execution path of a program, and thinking backwards makes it easy to locate the origin of a bug. So far backtracking has been…

In this paper, we take a deep dive into microarchitectural security from a hardware designer's perspective by reviewing the existing approaches to detect hardware vulnerabilities during the design phase. We show that a protection gap…

Static bug finders have been widely-adopted by developers to find bugs in real world software projects. They leverage predefined heuristic static analysis rules to scan source code or binary code of a software project, and report violations…

Compilation is an important process in developing configurable systems, such as Linux. However, identifying compilation errors in configurable systems is not straightforward because traditional compilers are not variability-aware. Previous…

Logging plays a crucial role in software engineering because it is key to perform various tasks including debugging, performance analysis, and detection of anomalies. Despite the importance of log data, the practice of logging still suffers…

A substantial fraction of the time that computational modellers dedicate to developing their models is actually spent trouble-shooting and debugging their code. However, how this process unfolds is seldom spoken about, maybe because it is…

Vulnerability prediction is valuable in identifying security issues efficiently, even though it requires the source code of the target software system, which is a restrictive hypothesis. This paper presents an experimental study to predict…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been suggested for use in automated vulnerability repair, but benchmarks showing they can consistently identify security-related bugs are lacking. We thus develop SecLLMHolmes, a fully automated evaluation…

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…

Automatically detecting software failures is an important task and a longstanding challenge. It requires finding failure-inducing test cases whose test input can trigger the software's fault, and constructing an automated oracle to detect…

Debugging CUDA programs has long been challenging because failures often arise from subtle interactions among hardware behavior, compiler decisions, memory hierarchy, and asynchronous execution. More importantly, with the rapid expansion of…

Programmers often add meaningful information about program semantics when naming program entities such as variables, functions, and macros. However, static analysis tools typically discount this information when they look for bugs in a…