First Infrastructure and Experimentation in Echo-debugging
This addresses debugging inefficiencies for developers when comparing buggy and non-buggy code versions, though it is exploratory and incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of identifying why a code change introduced a bug by proposing echo-debugging, a tool that debugs two executions in parallel using the Convergence Divergence Mapping algorithm to locate control-flow divergences and convergences, and demonstrates it with a scenario to solve a non-trivial bug.
As applications get developed, bugs inevitably get introduced. Often, it is unclear why a given code change introduced a given bug. To find this causal relation and more effectively debug, developers can leverage the existence of a previous version of the code, without the bug. But traditional debug-ging tools are not designed for this type of work, making this operation tedious. In this article, we propose as exploratory work the echo-debugger, a tool to debug two different executions in parallel, and the Convergence Divergence Mapping (CDM) algorithm to locate all the control-flow divergences and convergences of these executions. In this exploratory work, we present the architecture of the tool and a scenario to solve a non trivial bug.