Optimization Techniques for Algorithmic Debugging
[EN] Nowadays, undetected programming bugs produce a waste of billions of dollars per year to private and public companies and institutions. In spite of this, no significant advances in the debugging area that help developers along the software development process have been achieved yet. In fact, th...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2016 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) |
| Repositorio: | RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/68506 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/68506 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Depuración Depuración Algorítmica Java Técnicas Estrategias LENGUAJES Y SISTEMAS INFORMATICOS |
| Sumario: | [EN] Nowadays, undetected programming bugs produce a waste of billions of dollars per year to private and public companies and institutions. In spite of this, no significant advances in the debugging area that help developers along the software development process have been achieved yet. In fact, the same debugging techniques that were used 20 years ago are still being used now. Along the time, some alternatives have appeared, but there still is a long way for them to be useful enough to get into the software development process. One of them is algorithmic debugging, which abstracts the information the user has to investigate to debug the program, allowing them to focus on what is happening instead of how it is happening. This abstraction comes at a price: the granularity level of the bugs that can be detected allows for isolating wrongly implemented functions, but which part of them contains the bug cannot be found out yet. This thesis focusses on improving algorithmic debugging in many aspects. Concretely, the main aims of this thesis are to reduce the time the user needs to detect a programming bug as well as to provide the user with more detailed information about where the bug is located. To achieve these goals, some techniques have been developed to start the debugging sessions as soon as possible, to reduce the number of questions the user is going to be asked about, and to augment the granularity level of those bugs that algorithmic debugging can detect, allowing the debugger in this way to keep looking for bugs even inside functions. As a result of this thesis, three completely new techniques have been defined, an already existent technique has been improved, and two new algorithmic debugging search strategies have been defined that improve the already existent ones. Besides these theoretical results, a fully functional algorithmic debugger has been implemented that contains and supports all these techniques and strategies. This debugger is written in Java, and it debugs Java code. The election of this language is justified because it is currently one of the most widely extended and used languages. Also because it contains an interesting combination of unsolved challenges for algorithmic debugging. To further increase its usability, the debugger has been later adapted as an Eclipse plugin, so it could be used by a wider number of users. These two debuggers are publicly available, so any interested person can access them and continue with the research if they wish so. |
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