Automated Debugging: Are We There Yet?

Summary form only given. Software debugging 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. In particular, many techniques rely on a set of strong assumptions on how developers behave when debugging, fail to leverage the rich source of information represented by the user population, and focus mainly on trying to reduce the number of statements to examine, mostly ignoring the importance of identifying relevant inputs. This talk will provide an overview of the state of the art in the area of software debugging, discuss strengths and weaknesses of the main existing techniques, present a set of open challenges in the area of debugging, and sketch future research directions that may help address these challenges.