Instrumenting where it hurts: an automatic concurrent debugging technique

As concurrent and distributive applications are becoming more common and debugging such applications is very difficult, practical tools for automatic debugging of concurrent applications are in demand. In previous work, we applied automatic debugging to noise-based testing of concurrent programs. The idea of noise-based testing is to increase the probability of observing the bugs by adding, using instrumentation, timing ”noise” to the execution of the program. The technique of finding a small subset of points that causes the bug to manifest can be used as an automatic debugging technique. Previously, we showed that Delta Debugging can be used to pinpoint the bug location on some small programs. In the work reported in this paper, we create and evaluate two algorithms for automatically pinpointing program locations that are in the vicinity of the bugs on a number of industrial programs. We discovered that the Delta Debugging algorithms do not scale due to the non-monotonic nature...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISSTA
• Authors: Rachel Tzoref, Shmuel Ur, Elad Yom-Tov
• Keywords: Automatic Debugging, Debugging, ISSTA 2007, Noise-based Testing, Software Engineering