Distributed Statistical Debugging

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."

Comments

Other architectures?

[gouldtj]

From my reading of this, it sounds like the data is going to be architecture specific (i.e. x86, PPC). So that means that those hundreds of thousands of samples that are needed, would be needed for every architecture.

Hmph, mean they probably won't figure out why some programs are seemingly less stable on PPC :( But, I guess many bugs effect every architecture, so I can be happy about that ;)

Microsoft's Distributed Statistical Debugging

[twoslice]

Microsoft has been using this feature in XP and it apparently does not work. One of our applications crashes frequently for no reason at all. I have told all of our users (1600+) to just click the "SEND" button when it asks to send the "encountered a problem report" back to Microsoft.

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