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

Re:Sounds like Doc Watson

[Anonymous Coward]

No one I know ever sends that data back, but I'm sure someone must have once.

Plenty of users do. There's a great blog posting by Raymond Chen called There's an awful lot of overclocking out there where he talks about investigating some of these "Watson" crashes.

The crashes were impossible - instructions like

xor eax, eax

Turns out unscrupulous vendors were selling overclocked computers without informing buyers. Pretty cool article.