The omission finder for debugging what-should-have-happened bugs in object-oriented programs

Trace-based debuggers help a debugging process by displaying a history of executed operations with their parameters in a run of a program. However, those debuggers are unable to provide any clues when a program does not perform operations that ought to occur. This paper proposes a novel feature called the omission finder for trace-based debuggers. This feature correlates points-to analysis results with an execution history to show operations that could have been but actually were not performed on a specified instance if the program behaved differently. We implemented the omission finder on top of an existing trace-based debugger, and confirmed reduction of the number of debugging steps with an omission bug in a real-world program. Our user-study also showed reduction of debugging times with programs containing omission bugs. Categories and Subject Descriptors D2.5 [Software Engineering]: Testing and Debugging— Debugging aids, Tracing; D3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors—...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: SAC
• Authors: Kouhei Sakurai, Hidehiko Masuhara
• Keywords: Applied Computing, SAC 2015