A dynamic program slice is an executable part of a program whose behavior is identical, for the same program input, to that of the original program with respect to a variable(s) of interest at some execution position. In the existing dynamic slicing tools dynamic slices are represented in a textual form, i.e., a dynamic slice is displayed to programmers in the form of highlighted statements or ...

Debugging is the process of locating and fixing errors in computer programs. Debugging is essential in software development and almost every programming language has its own specialized tools for the task, with high variability regarding their debugging power. This paper briefly describes ongoing research towards a Ph.D. thesis on universal debugging, a proposal to develop a program debugging f...

Debugging is efficient if it detects all program errors in a short time. This paper discusses several techniques for improving debugging efficiency. Attention is given both to the initial debugging and to acceptance testing in the maintenance stage. A main decision is whether to use top-down or bottom-up debugging, and it is suggested that top-down debugging is more efficient if Combined with s...

Recent trends in the software industry have shown that the number of software development projects and their increasing complexity will continue to increase the demand for skilled programmers. However, debugging technology has not kept pace and valuable programmer resources are being wasted in debugging cycles. Correcting this trend requires innovative approaches to assisting programmers during...

A Heisenbug is a computer bug that disappears or alters its characteristics when we try to apply standard debugging techniques to catch the error. One example is a bug that occurs in a program compiled for optimized execution (non-debugging mode), but not in the same program compiled to run under debugmode. Executing program in debug-mode often cleans memory before the program starts, and can e...

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 relations over events -precedence and inclusion, and represents the temporal relationship between actions. A language for the computations over event traces is ...

Computer program graphs have proven very useful because they illuminate the structural characteristics of a program. Structural characteristics, as a representation of program complexity, have been shown to be strongly related to program development time, program quality and difficulty of debugging. 1-3 The use of graphs for these purposes is not widely known or understood in the data processin...

Cyclic debugging is one of the most important and most commonly used activities in programs development. During cyclic debugging, the program is repeatedly re-executed to track down errors when a failure has been observed. The cyclic debugging approach often fails for parallel programs because parallel programs reveal nondeterministic characteristics due to message race conditions. Execution re...

In software development, it is common practice to debug a program that has been compiled with little or no optimization applied. The generated code closely corresponds to the source and is readily described by a simple and straightforward debugging symbol table. A debugger can interpret and control execution of the code in a fashion close to the user’s source-level view of the program. Sometime...

Algorithmic debugging is a debugging technique that has been extended to practically all programming paradigms. Roughly speaking, the technique constructs an internal representation of all (sub)computations performed during the execution of a buggy program; and then, it asks the programmer about the correctness of such computations. The answers of the programmer guide the search for the bug unt...