Related papers: Tracers for debugging and program exploration

Debugging is a vital but challenging skill for beginner programmers to learn. It is also a difficult skill to teach. For secondary school teachers, who may lack time or programming experience, honing students' understanding of debugging can…

Debugging software, i.e., the localization of faults and their repair, is a key activity in software engineering. Therefore, effective and efficient debugging is one of the core skills a software engineer must develop. However, the teaching…

This paper introduces a novel multi-stage decision-making model that integrates hypothesis testing and dynamic programming algorithms to address complex decision-making scenarios.Initially,we develop a sampling inspection scheme that…

Program synthesis has seen many new applications in recent years, in large part thanks to the introduction of SyGuS. However, no existing SyGuS solvers have support for synthesizing recursive functions. We introduce an multi-phase algorithm…

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…

We present a new program synthesis approach that combines an encoder-decoder based synthesis architecture with a differentiable program fixer. Our approach is inspired from the fact that human developers seldom get their program correct on…

Debugging is an essential process with a large share of the development effort, being a relentless quest for offensive code through tracing, inspection and iterative running sessions. Probably every developer has been in a situation with a…

A key challenge in program synthesis is the astronomical size of the search space the synthesizer has to explore. In response to this challenge, recent work proposed to guide synthesis using learned probabilistic models. Obtaining such a…

Software services play a crucial role in daily life, with automated actions determining access to resources and information. Trusting service providers to perform these actions fairly and accurately is essential, yet challenging for users…

Runtime verification is checking whether a system execution satisfies or violates a given correctness property. A procedure that automatically, and typically on the fly, verifies conformance of the system's behavior to the specified…

To support developers in writing reliable and efficient concurrent programs, novel concurrent programming abstractions have been proposed in recent years. Programming with such abstractions requires new analysis tools because the execution…

For many years, developers could not figure out the mystery of OS kernels. The main source of this mystery is the interaction between operating systems and hardware while system's boot up and kernel initialization. In addition, many…

Modern research heavily relies on software. A significant challenge researchers face is understanding the complex software used in specific research fields. We target two scenarios in this context, namely long onboarding times for newcomers…

We present a deductive approach for the analysis of secure information flows with support for fine-grained policies that include declassifications in the form of delimited information release. By explicitly tracking the dependencies of…

Choreographies are global descriptions of interactions among concurrent components, most notably used in the settings of verification and synthesis of correct-by-construction software. They require a top-down approach: programmers first…

Interrupts have been widely used in safety-critical computer systems to handle outside stimuli and interact with the hardware, but reasoning about interrupt-driven software remains a difficult task. Although a number of static verification…

Sophisticated attackers find bugs in software, evaluate their exploitability, and then create and launch exploits for bugs found to be exploitable. Most efforts to secure software attempt either to eliminate bugs or to add mitigations that…

We propose a path-based approach to program repair for imperative programs. Our repair framework takes as input a faulty program, a logic specification that is refuted, and a hint where the fault may be located. An iterative abstraction…

Bounded model checking of pointer programs is a debugging technique for programs that manipulate dynamically allocated pointer structures on the heap. It is based on the following four observations. First, error conditions like dereference…

Analysis of execution traces plays a fundamental role in many program analysis approaches, such as runtime verification, testing, monitoring, and specification mining. Execution traces are frequently parametric, i.e., they contain events…