Debugging object-oriented programs with behavior views

ABSTRACT

A complex software system may perform many program tasks during execution to provide the required functionalities. To detect and localize bugs related to the implementation of these tasks, the software developers must be able to monitor the progress of the tasks during execution and check whether the actions for these tasks have been performed correctly. This paper presents a debugger to facilitate this monitoring. The debugger introduces a new kind of abstraction, the behavior views, that can be used to specify how the actions for a program task are expected to occur in various scenarios. Enhanced with statements that can check properties at various steps during the progress of the task, a behavior view can be used to monitor whether the actions for the tasks have been performed at the right time, on the right set of data, and with the right effects on the program states. Our initial case study indicates that the debugger can be useful for localizing bugs.

REFERENCES

• 1: M. Auguston. A program behavior model based on event grammar and its application for debugging automation. In AADEBUG'95, May 1995.
• 2: M. Auguston, C. Jeffery, and S. Underwood. A framework for automatic debugging. Technical Report TR-CS-004/2002, New Mexico State University, 2002.
• 3: P. Bates and J. Wileden. High-level debugging of distributed systems: The behavioral abstraction approach. The Journal of Systems and Software, (3):255--264, 1983.
• 4: M. Brorkens and M. Moller. Jassda trace assertions, runtime checking the dynamic of java programs. In International Conference on Testing of Communicating Systems, pages 39--48, March 2002.
• 5: Lilian Burdy , Yoonsik Cheon , David R. Cok , Michael D. Ernst , Joseph R. Kiniry , Gary T. Leavens , K. Rustan M. Leino , Erik Poll, An overview of JML tools and applications, International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), v.7 n.3, p.212-232, June 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10009-004-0167-4]
• 6: Mireille Ducassé, Coca: an automated debugger for C, Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, p.504-513, May 16-22, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/302405.302682]
• 7: L. Geiger and A. Zundorf. Graph based debugging with fujaba. Electronic Notes on Theorectical Computer Science, 72(2), 2002.
• 8: Ivar Jacobson , Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh, The unified software development process, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 9: Donglin Liang , Maikel Pennings , Mary Jean Harrold, Extending and evaluating flow-insenstitive and context-insensitive points-to analyses for Java, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.73-79, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/379605.379676]
• 10: David Luckham , Sriram Sankar , Shuzo Takahashi, Two-Dimensional Pinpointing: Debugging with Normal Specifications, IEEE Software, v.8 n.1, p.74-84, January 1991 [doi>10.1109/52.62935]
• 11: D. J. Murray and D. E. Parson. Automated debugging in java using OCL and JDI. In AADEBUG 2000, 2000.
• 12: Ronald A. Olsson , Richard H. Crawford , W. Wilson Ho, A dataflow approach to event-based debugging, Software—Practice & Experience, v.21 n.2, p.209-229, Feb. 1991 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380210207]
• 13: RTI. The echonomic impacts of inadequate infrastructure for software testing. NIST Planning report 02-3, 2002.
• 14: J. T. Schwartz. Debugging Techniques in Large Systems, chapter An Overview of Bugs, pages 1--16. Prentice-Hall, 1971.
• 15: J. Stanglewicz. Design-level debugging. Real-Time Magazine, pages 68--72, 1999.
• 16: Matthew Telles , Yuan Hsieh, The Science of Debugging, Coriolis Group Books, Scottsdale, AZ, 2001

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.5 Testing and Debugging
          Subjects: Debugging aids

General Terms:
Languages, Verification

Keywords:
debugging language, execution monitoring, secenario-driven