ACM Queue - Debugging

Deterministic Record-and-Replay: Zeroing in only on the nondeterministic actions of the process

Peter Alvaro, Andrew Quinn — 2024年9月19日 11:59:21 GMT

Stone Knives and Bear Skins

George V. Neville-Neil — 2023年7月18日 14:02:48 GMT

Getting Off the Mad Path: Debuggers and assertions

George V. Neville-Neil — 2022年1月31日 13:23:42 GMT

Divide and Conquer: The use and limits of bisection

George V. Neville-Neil — 2021年7月26日 10:01:52 GMT

Debugging Incidents in Google’s Distributed Systems: How experts debug production issues in complex distributed systems

Charisma Chan, Beth Cooper — 2020年6月06日 15:02:06 GMT

This article covers the outcomes of research performed in 2019 on how engineers at Google debug production issues, including the types of tools, high-level strategies, and low-level tasks that engineers use in varying combinations to debug effectively. It examines the research approach used to capture data, summarizing the common engineering journeys for production investigations and sharing examples of how experts debug complex distributed systems. Finally, the article extends the Google specifics of this research to provide some practical strategies that you can apply in your organization.

To Catch a Failure: The Record-and-Replay Approach to Debugging: A discussion with Robert O’Callahan, Kyle Huey, Devon O’Dell, and Terry Coatta

Robert O'Callahan, Kyle Huey, Devon O'Dell, Terry Coatta — 2020年3月28日 12:26:45 GMT

When work began at Mozilla on the record-and-replay debugging tool called rr, the goal was to produce a practical, cost-effective, resource-efficient means for capturing low-frequency nondeterministic test failures in the Firefox browser. Much of the engineering effort that followed was invested in making sure the tool could actually deliver on this promise with a minimum of overhead. What was not anticipated, though, was that rr would come to be widely used outside of Mozilla?and not just for sleuthing out elusive failures, but also for regular debugging.

Research for Practice: Tracing and Debugging Distributed Systems; Programming by Examples: Expert-curated Guides to the Best of CS Research

Peter Alvaro, Sumit Galwani — 2017年3月29日 11:51:58 GMT

This installment of Research for Practice covers two exciting topics in distributed systems and programming methodology. First, Peter Alvaro takes us on a tour of recent techniques for debugging some of the largest and most complex systems in the world: modern distributed systems and service-oriented architectures. The techniques Peter surveys can shed light on order amid the chaos of distributed call graphs. Second, Sumit Gulwani illustrates how to program without explicitly writing programs, instead synthesizing programs from examples! The techniques Sumit presents allow systems to "learn" a program representation from illustrative examples, allowing nonprogrammer users to create increasingly nontrivial functions such as spreadsheet macros. Both of these selections are well in line with RfP's goal of accessible, practical research; in fact, both contributors have successfully transferred their own research in each area to production, at Netflix and as part of Microsoft Excel. Readers may also find a use case!

The Debugging Mindset: Understanding the psychology of learning strategies leads to effective problem-solving skills.

Devon H. O'Dell — 2017年3月22日 13:04:14 GMT

Software developers spend 35-50 percent of their time validating and debugging software. The cost of debugging, testing, and verification is estimated to account for 50-75 percent of the total budget of software development projects, amounting to more than 100ドル billion annually. While tools, languages, and environments have reduced the time spent on individual debugging tasks, they have not significantly reduced the total time spent debugging, nor the cost of doing so. Therefore, a hyperfocus on elimination of bugs during development is counterproductive; programmers should instead embrace debugging as an exercise in problem solving.

Outsourcing Responsibility: What do you do when your debugger fails you?

George Neville-Neil — 2014年7月01日 11:03:33 GMT

Dear KV, I've been assigned to help with a new project and have been looking over the admittedly skimpy documentation the team has placed on the internal wiki. I spent a day or so staring at what seemed to be a long list of open-source projects that they intend to integrate into the system they have been building, but I couldn't find where their original work was described. I asked one of the project team members where I might find that documentation and was told that there really isn't much that they need to document, because all the features they need are available in various projects on github.

Wanton Acts of Debuggery: Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.

George Neville-Neil — 2011年10月24日 16:12:59 GMT

Wanton Acts of Debuggery

Keep your debug messages clear, useful, and not annoying.

Dear KV,

Why is it that people who add logging to their programs lack the creativity to differentiate their log messages? If they all say the same thing—for example, DEBUG—it's hard to tell what is going on, or even why the previous programmer added these statements in the first place.