Software debugging, testing, and verification

Abstract

In commercial software development organizations, increased complexity of products, shortened development cycles, and higher customer expectations of quality have placed a major responsibility on the areas of software debugging, testing, and verification. As this issue of the IBM Systems Journal illustrates, there are exciting improvements in the underlying technology on all three fronts. However, we observe that due to the informal nature of software development as a whole, the prevalent practices in the industry are still immature, even in areas where improved technology exists. In addition, tools that incorporate the more advanced aspects of this technology are not ready for large-scale commercial use. Hence there is reason to hope for significant improvements in this area over the next several years. Since one of the goals of this special issue of the IBM Systems Journal is to be accessible to the students of software engineering at large, we define relevant terminology and its implications (we include formal no

Evaluating the Effectiveness of BEN in Localizing Different Types of Software Fault

“…Debugging refers to the activity of locating software faults in a program and is considered one of the most challenging tasks. A significant amount of effort is spent in locating faults during debugging [4]. Automated fault localization tools were developed to reduce the amount of effort and time the developers spend on debugging.…”

Lightweight control-flow instrumentation and postmortem analysis in support of debugging

“…Debugging, testing, and verification account for 50-75% of a software project's cost [16]; these costs grow even higher in some cases [14,36]. Yet, post-deployment failures are inevitable in complex software.…”

Guided Debugging Practices of Game Based Programming for Novice Programmers

“…Novice programmers usually don"t know how to find the program errors and correct them [3]. In the research report of [4], it mentioned that the time of debugging, testing and verification usually takes 50% to 70% of the program development process. Lahtinen, Ala-Mutka and Jä rvinen [5] also indicated that finding errors is the third difficult work when novice programmers learn programming, which is next to using programming to solve particular task, and recognizing the functionality of procedures.…”