Software debugging has been regarded as one of the challenges in the field of software engineering. In practice, traditional debugging needs extensive labor and time in order to locate bugs in a typical software program. A typical programmer needs to set breaking points and execute the buggy program on several inputs. At the same time, he needs to examine the program states and try to locate th...

More and more program development tools have turned to Web-based. It has an advantage on being a multiplatform tool. This work proposes a debugging tool based on web interface. The main idea of the tool is that the execution of the program can be regarded as a flow. This flow can be captured and played back later. Therefore, any state of the executed program can be analyzed and errors can be pi...

This paper describes a visuai performance debugging system for parallel programs. Main features of the system are visualization of program execution, modification of processor scheduling using direct manipulation, simulation of execution of the modified program, and automatic modification of the source program. Visualization and direct manipulation enhance ease of operation. Simulation allows a...

Debugging multithreaded or parallel programs is a hard problem due to unintended nondeterministic results of the program, called data races. Previous race detection techniques have limitations of coverage for synchronization constructs in detecting first races for parallel programs with random synchronizations. We present, in this paper, an efficient twopass algorithm to detect the first races ...

The debugging cycle is the most common methodology for finding and correcting errors in sequential programs. Cyclic debugging is effective because sequential programs are usually deterministic. Debugging parallel programs is considerably more difficult because successive executions of the same program often do not produce the same results. In this paper we present a general solution for reprodu...

Efficient program path exploration is important for many software engineering activities such as testing, debugging and verification. However, enumerating all paths of a program is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we develop a partitioning of program paths based on the program output. Two program paths are placed in the same partition if they derive the output similarly, that is, the sym...

2 Computer Automated Debugging: Are We Close? F or the past 50 years, software engineers have enjoyed tremendous productivity increases as more and more tasks have become automated. Unfortunately, debugging—the process of identifying and correcting a fail-ure's root cause—seems to be the exception, remaining as labor-intensive and painful as it was five decades ago. An engineer or programmer st...

Given a program P that exhibits a certain property ψ (e.g., a C program that crashes GCC when it is being compiled), the goal of program reduction is to minimize P to a smaller variant P ′ that still exhibits the same property, i.e., ψ (P ′). Program reduction is important and widely demanded for testing and debugging. For example, all compiler/interpreter development projects need effective pr...