This paper discusses the development of a debugging tool for parallel programs showing how the requirements posed by high-level tools for parallel program development have influenced the design of the debugging system since its early stages of development. We concentrate our attention upon the interfacing of the debugger with other tools of a parallel software engineering environment, namely a ...

As most parallel and distributed programs are internally non-deterministic – consecutive runs with the same input might result in a different program flow – vanilla cyclic debugging techniques as such are useless. In order to use cyclic debugging tools, we need a tool that records information about an execution so that it can be replayed for debugging. Because recording information interferes w...

Programmers must draw explicit connections between their code and runtime state to properly assess the correctness of their programs. However, debugging tools often decouple the program state from the source code and require explicitly invoked views to bridge the rift between program editing and program understanding. To unobtrusively reveal runtime behavior during both normal execution and deb...

Traces of program executions are a helpful source of information for program debugging. They, however, give a picture of program executions at such a low level that users often have diiculties to interpret the information. Opium, our extendable trace analyzer, is connected to a \standard" Prolog tracer. Opium is programmable and extendable. It provides a trace query language and abstract views ...

Program slicing is a technique for determining the set of statements of a program that potentially affect the value of a variable at some point in the program. Intra and interprocedural slicing of high-level languages has greatly been studied in the literature; both static and dynamic techniques have been used to aid in the debugging, maintenance, parallelization, program integration, and dataa...

Model based diagnosis systems from Artificial Intelligence are used to find faulty components in physical devices and have also been applied to find bugs in computer programs, also called "model based software debugging". Although this approach can help an advanced programmer to find bugs in his program, it seems not adequate for programming apprentices. In this paper, we present an approach fo...

Program slicing is a viable method to restrict the focus of a task to specific sub-components of a program. Examples of applications include debugging, testing, program comprehension, restructuring, downsizing, and parallelization. This paper discusses different statement deletion based slicing methods, together with algorithms and applications to software engineering.

We outline Ensemble, a design and implementation methodology for composing message passing (MP) applications from program components. We also outline specification composition, directly associated with application composition. We present the integration of specification and implementation of program development. We particularly elaborate on testing and debugging of MP applications based on the ...

This study examines the effect of individual differences on the program comprehension strategies of users working with an unfamiliar programming system. Participants of varying programming expertise were given a battery of psychological tests, a brief introduction to a statistical programming environment, and a 20-minute debugging task. Our data show that while there were distinct comprehension...