Automated Debugging: Are We There Yet?

December 18, 2013

Alessandro Orso


Automated Debugging: Are We There Yet?

Time:   11:00am
Location:   Meeting room 302 (Mountain View), level 3

Software debugging, which involves localizing, understanding, and removing the cause of a failure, is a notoriously difficult, extremely time consuming, and human-intensive activity. For this reason, researchers have invested a great deal of effort in developing automated techniques and tools for supporting various debugging tasks. Although potentially useful, most of these techniques have yet to fully demonstrate their practical effectiveness. Moreover, many current debugging approaches suffer from some common limitations and rely on several strong assumptions on both the characteristics of the code being debugged and how developers behave when debugging such code. This talk will provide an overview of the state of the art in the broader area of software debugging, discuss strengths and weaknesses of the main existing debugging techniques, present a set of open challenges in this area, and sketch future research directions that may help address these challenges.