Post-Mortem Dynamic analysis for software debugging

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the state-of-art debugging techniques, and address the challenge to make these techniques applicable for debugging realistic applications. First, we study dynamic slicing techniques. We develop a dynamic slicing method for Java programs, and publicly release a slicing tool. Our technique works on the trace produced by executing a Java program. We present how to compactly represent such traces, and how dynamic slicing algorithms can traverse the traces without costly decompression. We also extend our dynamic slicing method to explain omission errors. Furthermore, we discuss hierarchical dynamic slicing which helps the developer understand a large dynamic slice. We also study test based fault localization techniques. We propose a control flow based difference metric, and present the way to automatically return a successful program run which is close to a failing run in terms of the difference metric. The successful run is then used for debugging.