Related papers: Execution replay and debugging
One of the main challenges of debugging is to understand why the program fails for certain inputs but succeeds for others. This becomes especially difficult if the fault is caused by an interaction of multiple inputs. To debug such…
Software systems evolve throughout their life cycles. Many revisions are produced over time. Model checking each revision of the software is impractical. Regression verification suggests reusing intermediate results from the previous…
Parallel application I/O performance often does not meet user expectations. Additionally, slight access pattern modifications may lead to significant changes in performance due to complex interactions between hardware and software. These…
Debugging is a central yet complex activity in software engineering. Prior studies have documented debugging strategies and tool usage, but little theory explains how experienced developers reason about bugs in large, real-world codebases.…
Offline runtime verification involves the static analysis of executions of a system against a specification. For distributed systems, it is generally not possible to characterize executions in the form of global traces, given the absence of…
Causal-consistent reversible debugging allows one to explore concurrent computations back and forth in order to locate the source of an error. In this setting, backward steps can be chosen freely as long as they are "causal consistent",…
Due to the increased complexity of parallel and distributed programs, debugging of them is considered to be the most difficult and time consuming part of the software lifecycle. Tool support is hence a crucial necessity to hide complexity…
The ability to record and replay program executions with low overhead enables many applications, such as reverse-execution debugging, debugging of hard-to-reproduce test failures, and "black box" forensic analysis of failures in deployed…
As the scale of quantum programs grows to match that of classical software, the nascent field of quantum software engineering must mature and tools such as debuggers will become increasingly important. However, developing a quantum debugger…
Runtime Monitoring is a lightweight and dynamic verification technique that involves observing the internal operations of a software system and/or its interactions with other external entities, with the aim of determining whether the system…
When developing a software system, a change in one part of the system may lead to unwanted changes in other parts of the system. These affected parts may interfere with system performance, so regression testing is used to deal with these…
New trends towards multiple core processors imply using standard programming models to develop efficient, reliable and portable programs for distributed memory multiprocessors and workstation PC clusters. Message passing using MPI is widely…
Reactive software calls for instrumentation methods that uphold the reactive attributes of systems. Runtime verification imposes another demand on the instrumentation, namely that the trace event sequences it reports to monitors are sound…
Developers create bug-reproducing tests that support debugging by failing as long as the bug is present, and passing once the bug has been fixed. These tests are usually integrated into existing test suites and executed regularly alongside…
Array-intensive programs are often amenable to parallelization across many cores on a single machine as well as scaling across multiple machines and hence are well explored, especially in the domain of high-performance computing. These…
Machine learning tasks entail the use of complex computational pipelines to reach quantitative and qualitative conclusions. If some of the activities in a pipeline produce erroneous or uninformative outputs, the pipeline may fail or produce…
Reversible debuggers help programmers to find the causes of misbehaviours in concurrent programs more quickly, by executing a program backwards from the point where a misbehaviour was observed, and looking for the bug(s) that caused it.…
Malware is a security threat, and various means are adapted to detect and block them. In this paper, we demonstrate a method where malware can evade malware analysis. The method is based on single-step reverse execution of code using the…
Designing and debugging distributed systems is notoriously difficult. The correctness of a distributed system is largely determined by its handling of failure scenarios. The sequence of events leading to a bug can be long and complex, and…
Program errors are hard to find because of the cause-effect gap between the time when an error occurs and the time when the error becomes apparent to the programmer. Although debugging techniques such as conditional and data breakpoints…