Debugging Debugging

Speaker:	Professor Andreas ZELLER
		Saarland University
		Germany

Title:		"Debugging Debugging"

Date:		Friday, 27 November, 2009

Time:		4:30pm - 5:30pm

Venue:		Room 2465 (via lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Imagine some program and a number of changes. If none of these changes is
applied ("yesterday"), the program works. If all changes are applied
("today"), the program does not work. Which change is responsible for the
failure? This is how the abstract of the paper "Yesterday, my program
worked. Today, it does not. Why?" started; a paper which, originally
published at ESEC/FSE 1999], introduced the concept of delta debugging,
one of the most popular automated debugging techniques. This year, this
paper has received the ACM SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award, recognizing its
influence in the past ten years. In my talk, I review the state of
debugging then and now, share how it can be hard to be simple, what
programmers really need, and what research should do (and should not do)
to explore these needs and cater to them.


******************
Biography:

Andreas Zeller is a full professor at Saarland University in Saarbrücken,
Germany. His broad research area is software engineering, which concerns
the construction and evolution of large, complex software systems at
reasonable cost and high reliability. His research in this area concerns
the analysis of these systems, especially the analysis of why these
systems fail to work as they should. He won the 2009 SISGSOFT impact paper
award.