Debugging in Parallel

Abstract
The presence of multiple faults in a program can inhibit the abil- ity of fault-localization techniques to locate the faults. This prob- lem occurs for two reasons: when a program fails, the number of faults is, in general, unknown; and certain faults may mask or ob- fuscate other faults. This paper presents our approach to solving this problem that leverages the well-known advantages of parallel work flows to reduce the time-to-release of a program. Our ap- proach consists of a technique that enables more effective debug- ging in the presence of multiple faults and a methodology that en- ables multiple developers to simultaneously debug multiple faults. The paper also presents an empirical study that demonstrates that our parallel-debugging technique and methodology can yield a dra- matic decrease in total debugging time compared to a one-fault-at- a-time, or conventionally sequential, approach.

This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit: