SHF: Small: BugX: In-house Debugging of Field Failures to Improve Software Quality

SHF：小：BugX：现场故障的内部调试以提高软件质量

• 批准号: 1320783
• 负责人: Alessandro Orso
• 金额: $ 43.5万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-09-01 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1320783&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Small; BugX; house; Debugging

A recent survey conducted among developers of the Apache, Eclipse, andMozilla projects showed that the ability to recreate fieldfailures--failures of the software that occur after deployment, onuser machines--is considered of fundamental importance wheninvestigating bug reports. Unfortunately, the information typicallycontained in a bug report, such as memory dumps or call stacks, isusually insufficient for recreating the problem. Even more advancedapproaches for gathering field data and help in-house debugging tendto provide too little information to developers and to be thereforeineffective.The overall goal of this project is to improve the state of the art byallowing, supporting, and partially automating, actual in-housedebugging of field failures. Specifically, this research will developnovel techniques and tools that let developers reproduce, analyze, andunderstand, in-house, failures observed in the field. Given a fieldfailure, the developed techniques will (1) collect a suitable set ofdata about the failure on the user machine, (2) generate one or moreinputs that can be executed against the failing application and resultin a failure analogous to the one observed, and (3) provide hints onthe root causes of the failure and possible fixes for these causes. Toachieve this goal, the research will combine static and dynamicprogram analysis techniques and leverage and extend techniques fortesting deployed software, input generation and anonymization, andsoftware debugging. If successful, this research will provideunprecedented advantages to developers by allowing them to debug fieldfailures in the same way in which they debug in-house ones, which willimprove software quality and benefit all segments of society thatdepend on software. Furthermore, the project will develop and makeavailable to the broader scientific community educational materialsthat incorporate research findings, tools that implement thetechniques developed within the project, and samples of the softwarebenchmarks used in empirical evaluations. The availability ofcurriculum materials, tools, infrastructure, and benchmarks willadvance knowledge, enable additional research in the area, andultimately further benefit society.

最近在Apache、Eclipse和Mozilla项目的开发人员中进行的一项调查显示，在调查错误报告时，重新创建现场故障的能力--部署后在用户机器上发生的软件故障--被认为是基本重要的。不幸的是，错误报告中通常包含的信息，如内存转储或调用堆栈，通常不足以重现问题。更先进的收集现场数据和帮助内部调试的方法往往提供给开发人员的信息太少，因此效果不佳。该项目的总体目标是通过允许、支持和部分自动化现场故障的实际内部调试来改善技术水平。具体地说，这项研究将开发新的技术和工具，使开发人员能够在内部复制、分析和理解在现场观察到的故障。在给定现场故障的情况下，所开发的技术将(1)收集关于用户机器上的故障的适当数据集，(2)生成可针对故障应用程序执行的一个或多个输出，并导致与所观察到的故障类似的故障，以及(3)提供关于故障根本原因的提示以及对这些原因的可能修复。为了实现这一目标，研究将结合静态和动态程序分析技术，并利用和扩展测试已部署软件、输入生成和匿名以及软件调试的技术。如果成功，这项研究将为开发人员提供前所未有的优势，使他们能够像调试内部故障一样调试现场故障，这将提高软件质量，并使依赖软件的所有社会阶层受益。此外，该项目还将编写教育材料并提供给更广泛的科学界，其中包括研究成果、实施项目内开发的技术的工具以及用于经验评估的软件基准样本。课程材料、工具、基础设施和基准的可获得性将促进知识的发展，使该领域的更多研究成为可能，并最终进一步造福社会。