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Distributed Statistical Debugging

Posted by michael on from the data-crunching dept.

Luis Villa writes "The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project at UC Berkeley and Stanford is working on statistical debugging techniques to report, find, and fix the bugs that drive the most users crazy every day. A handful of outside bug volunteers have been running the project's special feedback builds for a few weeks, and that has generated some really interesting data. But for strong results they need more runs. /. has been known to generate those kinds of big numbers ;) Their site has feedback builds of several open source applications, and the entire project is open sourced. Read more about it, then install some applications, and help them make our free software better for everyone. I'm really looking forward to the end results."

5 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. RTFA by jbellis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    this isn't the same thing at all.

    the "stanford bug checker" is a static source analysis program. this is something else entirely, and arguably more useful.

  2. Re:Other architectures? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, but if you fix a crash-causing bug (such as a buffer overrun) on one architecture, it's likely that the same bug was present on others. Or rather, would also cause a crash on other platforms - since a bug is a property of the source code, the meaning of the program, and the fact that a program happens to work on Tuesday doesn't mean the bug is not there.

    Consider: projects such as openssh and Apache do not issue separate vulnerability warnings for different platforms. If a memory-corruption bug exists, it is probably exploitable on most platforms given the right conditions.

    Still, it's very likely that some particular bug cause crashes often on PPC, but is less likely to be tickled on x86. Then it might not get fixed, because it's less likely to be reported. But if a PPC user does report it, the x86 users benefit from the fix too, even if for them it was a fairly obscure and not-often-noticed bug.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  3. Re:TO America: by 91degrees · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Freedom of speech should not be extended to those who seek to curtail the freedom of speech

    Why the hell not!? Freedom of speech is a right. Not a luxury good to be traded.

  4. Re:Microsoft's Distributed Statistical Debugging by MrMr · · Score: 2, Insightful

    In my calculations Microsoft must have gotten at least 30,000 reports of this bug and it is still not fixed yet...

    Yes, but what makes you think the feature doesn't work?

  5. Re:Microsoft's Distributed Statistical Debugging by Koyaanisqatsi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would click SEND more often myself if the app would give you back a "support ticket number", or a bug ID in the DB so that you could look back later and see how many other entries have been logged for the same error and if a patch is in the making ...

    Now that would be cool! (and very much like an automated bugzilla interface compiled w/ the code ...)