CAREER: Leveraging Everyday Usage of Programs to Eliminate Bugs

构建高质量的软件对于实现高度的安全性、可用性和效率是至关重要的。因此，软件开发人员花费了一半以上的时间来测试和调试软件，以消除程序中的错误。因此，软件质量保证的成本过高。尽管做出了这些努力，但在现实系统中使用的现代软件仍然充满了错误。这个项目的目标是帮助开发人员发现、重现和修复bug。为了实现这一目标，该项目将开发系统地使用每天由软件生成的大量信息的技术。就像软件是为了执行特定的任务而构建的一样，为了调试和测试的目的而监视信息的过程也需要被调整以实现特定的目标。目前主要从所有程序中收集通用信息的方法有很大的局限性。因此，本研究将引入新的方法，以特定于程序的方式监测信息。这些信息将被自适应地调整，以自动重现复杂的错误。一旦bug重现，修复起来就容易多了。这项研究的一个关键贡献将是使用成功和不成功的程序执行来帮助重现错误。这项工作将解决长期存在的开放性问题，这些问题使得在现实系统中很难重现bug。所开发的技术将有利于其他研究领域，如软件测试和程序修复。从广义上讲，这项研究将减少软件错误的成本，并产生更高质量的软件，最终造福社会。这项研究创建的工具和数据集将公开发布，以促进可重复性、进一步研究和学术界和工业界的采用。该项目的另一个重点是教育计划，该计划通过学术和工业合作与研究计划紧密结合。该项目将开发并推出一个以调试为中心的公开在线编程课程。这门课程将首先在当地试点，以吸引代表性不足和服务不足的K-8学生。为了实现统一的教育和研究愿景，这个项目的结果将为正在进行的外展活动提供信息，以促进对计算机的理解和扩大参与。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Building good quality software is crucial for achieving a high degree of security, availability, and efficiency. Therefore, software developers spend more than half of their time testing and debugging software to remove errors in programs. As a result, the cost of software quality assurance is exorbitant. Despite these efforts, modern software used in real-world systems is full of bugs. The goal of this project is to help developers find, reproduce, and fix bugs. To achieve this goal, this project will develop techniques that systematically use the massive amount of information generated by software every day. Much like software is built to carry out specific tasks, the process that monitors information for debugging and testing purposes also needs to be adapted to achieve specific objectives. Current approaches that mainly collect generic information from all programs have significant limitations. Therefore, this research will introduce new approaches to monitor information in program-specific ways. This information will be adaptively adjusted to automatically reproduce complex bugs. Once bugs are reproduced, they are much easier to fix. A key contribution of this research will be to use both successful and unsuccessful program executions to help reproduce bugs.This work will solve long-standing open problems that make it very hard to reproduce bugs in real-world systems. The developed techniques will benefit other research areas such as software testing and program repair. Broadly, this research will reduce the costs of software bugs and result in higher quality software, ultimately benefiting society. The tools and datasets created by this research will be openly released to promote reproducibility, further studies, and adoption by academia and industry. Another key focus of this project is an educational plan that is closely integrated with the research plan via academic and industrial collaborations. This project will develop and launch an openly-available online programming course centered around debugging. This course will be initially piloted locally to engage underrepresented and under-served K-8 students. Towards a unified education and research vision, the results of this project will inform ongoing outreach activities to promote understanding and broaden participation in computing.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.