Studying the Advancement in Debugging Practice of Professional Software Developers

In 1997, Henry Lieberman stated that debugging is the dirty little secret of computer science. Since then, several promising debugging technologies have been developed such as back-in-time debuggers and automatic fault localization methods. However, the last study about the state-of-the-art in debugging is still more than 15 years old and so it is not clear whether these new approaches have been applied in practice or not. For that reason, we investigate the current state of debugging in a new comprehensive study. First, we review the available literature and learn about current approaches and study results. Second, we observe several professional developers while debugging and interview them about their experiences. Based on these results, we create a questionnaire that should serve as the basis for a large-scale online debugging survey later on. With these results, we expect new insights into debugging practice that help to suggest new directions for future research.