Related papers: Tracers for debugging and program exploration

Static analysis remains one of the most popular approaches for detecting and correcting poor or vulnerable program code. It involves the examination of code listings, test results, or other documentation to identify errors, violations of…

Understanding the run-time behavior of concurrent programs is a challenging task. A popular approach is to establish a happens- before relation via vector clocks. Thus, we can identify bugs and per- formance bottlenecks, for example, by…

Program synthesis aims to automatically construct human-readable programs that satisfy given task specifications, such as input/output pairs or demonstrations. Recent works have demonstrated encouraging results in a variety of domains, such…

Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in software engineering and program analysis tasks. They usually take a program and make some predictions about it, e.g., bug prediction. We call these models neural program analyzers. The…

Debuggers are a popular reverse engineering and tampering tool. Self-debugging is an effective technique for applications to defend themselves against hostile debuggers. In penetration tests on state-of-the-art self-debugging, we observed…

Deep learning model design, development, and debugging is a process driven by best practices, guidelines, trial-and-error, and the personal experiences of model developers. At multiple stages of this process, performance and internal model…

Refactoring is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure. Not only researchers, but also practitioners, need to know about past…

Software verification is a tedious process that involves the analysis of multiple failed verification attempts, and adjustments of the program or specification. This is especially the case for complex requirements, e.g., regarding security…

During the software lifecycle, a program can evolve several times for different reasons such as the optimisation of a bottle-neck, the refactoring of an obscure function, etc. These code changes often involve several functions or modules,…

Test suites are designed to validate the operation of a system against requirements. One important aspect of a test suite design is to ensure that system operation logic is tested completely. A test suite should drive a system through all…

Ad hoc parsers are everywhere: they appear any time a string is split, looped over, interpreted, transformed, or otherwise processed. Every ad hoc parser gives rise to a language: the possibly infinite set of input strings that the program…

Automatic program repair usually relies heavily on test cases for both bug identification and fix validation. The issue is that writing test cases is tedious, running them takes much time, and validating a fix through tests does not…

Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems.…

Debuggers for logic programming languages have traditionally had a capability most other debuggers did not: the ability to jump back to a previous state of the program, effectively travelling back in time in the history of the computation.…

Bug finding tools can find defects in software source code us- ing an automated static analysis. This automation may be able to reduce the time spent for other testing and review activities. For this we need to have a clear understanding of…

Regression bugs occur whenever software functionality that previously worked as desired stops working, or no longer works as expected. Code changes, such as bug fixes or new feature work, may result in a regression bug. Regression bugs are…

Software developers solve a diverse and wide range of problems. While software engineering research often focuses on tools to support this problem solving, the strategies that developers use to solve problems are at least as important. In…

Timestamps play a pivotal role in digital forensic event reconstruction, but due to their non-essential nature, tampering or manipulation of timestamps is possible by users in multiple ways, even on running systems. This has a significant…

This paper addresses the challenge of understanding the waiting dependencies between the threads and hardware resources required to complete a task. The objective is to improve software performance by detecting the underlying bottlenecks…

Program errors can occur in any type of programming, and can manifest in a variety of ways, such as unexpected output, crashes, or performance issues. And program error diagnosis can often be too abstract or technical for developers to…