First Infrastructure and Experimentation in Echo-debugging

Abstract

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 debugging 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.