Related papers: On-the-fly Query-Based Debugging with Examples

Dynamically typed programming languages are popular in education and the software industry. While presenting a low barrier to entry, they suffer from run-time type errors and longer-term problems in code quality and maintainability.…

In software practice, static analysis tools remain an integral part of detecting defects in software and there have been various tools designed to run the analysis in different programming languages like Java, C++, and Python. This paper…

This paper suggests an approach to the development of software testing and debugging automation tools based on precise program behavior models. The program behavior model is defined as a set of events (event trace) with two basic binary…

The Visual Debugger is an IntelliJ IDEA plugin that presents debug information as an object diagram to enhance program understanding. Reflecting on our past development, we detail the lessons learned and roadblocks we have experienced while…

Test-based automated program repair has been a prolific field of research in software engineering in the last decade. Many approaches have indeed been proposed, which leverage test suites as a weak, but affordable, approximation to program…

Flaky tests are tests that can non-deterministically pass or fail, even in the absence of code changes.Despite being a source of false alarms, flaky tests often remain in test suites once they are detected, as they also may be relied upon…

Performance debugging in production is a fundamental activity in modern service-based systems. The diagnosis of performance issues is often time-consuming, since it requires thorough inspection of large volumes of traces and performance…

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…

Fault localization is a fundamental aspect of debugging, aiming to identify code regions likely responsible for failures. Traditional techniques primarily correlate statement execution with failures, yet program behavior is influenced by…

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…

It is widely recognized that program repair tools need to have a high precision to be useful, i.e., the generated patches need to have a high probability to be correct. However, it is fundamentally difficult to ensure the correctness of the…

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.…

In programming education, Debugging and Teaching (DT) task is a common scenario where students receive assistance in correcting their erroneous code. The task involves multiple inputs, including erroneous code, error messages, reference…

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the major declarative programming paradigms in the area of logic programming and non-monotonic reasoning. Despite that ASP features a simple syntax and an intuitive semantics, errors are common during…

We consider the task of analyzing message-passing programs by observing their run-time behavior. We introduce a purely library-based instrumentation method to trace communication events during execution. A model of the dependencies among…

In software engineering practice, fixing a bug promptly reduces the associated costs. On the other hand, the manual bug fixing process can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. In this work, we introduce a bug triaging method,…

Context: In C, low-level errors, such as buffer overflow and use-after-free, are a major problem, as they cause security vulnerabilities and hard-to-find bugs. C lacks automatic checks, and programmers cannot apply defensive programming…

In the past decade, research on test-suite-based automatic program repair has grown significantly. Each year, new approaches and implementations are featured in major software engineering venues. However, most of those approaches are…

A new style of temporal debugging is proposed. The new URDB debugger can employ such techniques as temporal search for finding an underlying fault that is causing a bug. This improves on the standard iterative debugging style, which…

Debugging is an essential skill when learning to program, yet its instruction and emphasis often vary widely across introductory courses. In the era of code-generating large language models (LLMs), the ability for students to reason about…