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Debugging Expert Wins ACM Dissertation Award

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the just-a-programmer-with-a-really-big-shoe dept.

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."

6 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Check out FindBugs for finding bugs in Java by licamell · · Score: 5, Informative
    This reminded me of work going at at UMD (University of Maryland, College Park). I know it's not quite the same thing, but I feel as though this is a good place to mention it and the slashdot community would appreciate this software. FindBugs is a very cool tool for finding bugs in java code. And no, I am not affiliated with this project, I just saw a talk on it a couple months ago.

    http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/

  2. Thank you, open source community by Benoni · · Score: 5, Informative

    This research has been a wonderful collaborative effort, and many people deserve to share the credit. To quote from part of the Acknowledgements section of my dissertation:

    I am indebted to the many members of the open source community who have supported our work. My thanks go out to the many anonymous users of our public deployment, and to the developers of the open source projects used in our public deployment and case studies.

    So thanks, Slashdot, for helping me find those users (or helping them find me). The exposure was invaluable. And thanks, open source community, for your participation. I've benefitted greatly from standing on your massed shoulders. This could not have happened without you.

  3. Re:Sounds like Doc Watson by Benoni · · Score: 5, Informative
    sending the relevant data back to UWisc without informing the user.

    Informed participation is a really big deal for me. No user should ever find themselves participating in the Cooperative Bug Isolation Project without their knowledge. Opt-in is explicit and revokable, and if the opt-in system runs into trouble of any kind, the fallback position is no data reporting at all.

    The whole thing collapses if users don't trust me. So I've taken every measure I can think of to ensure that they can. Please see the relevant project page for more details about privacy matters.

    It sounds like a good idea, but I doubt it is in Liblit's power to fix Windows OS bugs.

    Working on it! Check back in with me in a few years ... maybe less. :-)

  4. Re:Heh... by Benoni · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, exactly. The users are beta testers; we may as well admit it. I want to make them better beta testers. :-)

  5. Re:Sounds like Doc Watson by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Request for more information by Benoni · · Score: 5, Informative
    However, asking us to read 170-odd pages of your dissertation is a little much.

    Hey, it's a real page-turner. Well, it has pages and they turn, at least.

    The other questions you ask are all good ones, but a bit much to address in a Slashdot comment. Please see the project home page for more information. The "Learn More" page may answer some of your questions, and there are additional drill-down pages from there with even more technical material on selected topics.

    Please understand that I don't mean to brush off your insightful questions. They are just questions for which satisfactory answers are hard to give in a sentence or two.