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Divergence-Driven Debugging: Understanding Behavioral Changes Between Two Program Versions

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Daily software changes present an inherent risk of introducing bugs. To understand such bugs, it is crucial to understand why specific changes introduced the bugs. This is difficult and time-consuming. We propose Divergence-Driven Debugging, an approach using a debugger for detecting execution divergences between two versions of the same program. Developers can explore both versions' execution in full and compare them based on the detected divergences. We evaluate our approach on a bug scenario and show that our debugger highlights the live state and behavior required to understand why the changes produce the bug and to identify its root cause.

Source: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)

DOI: 10.1109/icpc66645.2025.00031

Authors: Rémi Dufloer, Imen Sayar, Anne Etien, Steven Costiou

Institutions: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique, Université de Lille, Centrale Lille Institut, Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille

Language: English

Topic: Software Testing and Debugging Techniques

Subfield: Software

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W4411359865

FWCI:

Cites: 32

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Related to: 10