Slashdot Mirror
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."
No, not the wild-eyed madcap scientist from Back to the Future. Doctor Watson is an OS service present in Windows that monitors the running process list for terminal assertions. When a program hits an exception that it can't handle, it terminates immediately and Doctor Watson is on the scene to read the last gasps of the process before its bits get blasted. Microsoft even came up with a way to harness this to allow users to send real-time feedback to Microsoft HQ whenever a crash occurred in a program. No one I know ever sends that data back, but I'm sure someone must have once.
The current idea seems to be tracking the same termination events in the same way as Doctor Watson and sending the relevant data back to UWisc without informing the user. It sounds like a good idea, but I doubt it is in Liblit's power to fix Windows OS bugs.