Automated Debugging : Still a Dream ?

A good death for cancer patients: still a dream?

Programmers Should Still Use Slices When Debugging

What is the best technique for fault localization? In a study of 37 real bugs (and 37 injected faults) in more than a dozen open source C programs, we compare the effectiveness of statistical debugging against dynamic slicing—the first study ever to compare the techniques. On average, dynamic slicing is more effective than statistical debugging, requiring programmers to examine only 14% (42 lin...

A Pragmatic Survey of Automated Debugging

This article proposes a structuring view of the area of automated debugging. Nineteen automated debugging systems are analyzed. Thirteen existing automated debugging techniques are brieey evaluated from a pragmatic point of view. The three underlying strategies are identiied, namely veriication with respect to speciication, checking with respect to language knowledge and ltering with respect to...

Automated Breakpoint Generation for Debugging

In debugging processes breakpoints are frequently used to inspect and understand the run-time program behavior. Although modern development environments provide convenient breakpoint utilities, it mostly requires considerable human effort to create useful breakpoints. Before setting a breakpoint or typing a breakpoint condition, developers usually have to make some judgements and hypotheses bas...

Automated Debugging of Syntax Errors

Program debugging is a form of diagnosis that might be referred to as \routine." As such, debugging has similar properties as diagnosis and yet can be solved in a more straightforward manner than many diagnostic problems. Automating the debugging problem is of interest for several reasons. Debugging is a time-consuming process that tends to haunt many programmers from novices to experts. Yet th...