Debugging Expert Wins ACM Dissertation Award

An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is reporting that Ben Liblit has been awarded the 2005 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his study on understanding and fixing software 'bugs' in the real world. From the article: 'Liblit's dissertation proposes a method for leveraging the key strength of user communities - their overwhelming numbers. His approach uses sparse random sampling rather than complete data collection for gathering information from the experiences of large numbers of software end users. It also simultaneously ensures that the observed data is an unbiased, representative subset of the complete program behavior across all runs.' Slashdot broke the story on this research back in 2003. Apparently the project is still going strong."

Comments

dissertation:

[sxtxixtxcxh]

they're not bugs, they're features.

Heh...

[the_skywise]

So somebody went and formalized the theory of "the users are the beta testers"...

Re:blargh

[Neo-Rio-101]

*tears out own hair and screams*

Shouldn't that be "leveraging out own hair and screaming"?

Re:Thank you, open source community

[SEWilco]

You're welcome.
We will now debug your dissertation.

reminds me of my rules on reporting list outages

[SuperBanana]

This reminds me of a method on reporting mailing list outages I devised back in 2001 or so.

I told people we were switching to new software (Mailman)- and that if they got an error message or similar, to flip a quarter X times (I forget how many) and ONLY email me if they got all heads. I didn't want to get a couple dozen reports of the same problem, and I figured that if there were any problems, they'd affect a large set of the 1000+ users of the list.

It worked brilliantly.