Automated Debugging: Are We Close

Although software engineers have enjoyed tremendous productivity increases as more of their tasks have become automated, debugging remains as labor-intensive and painful as it was 50 years ago. An engineer or programmer must still set up hypotheses to use in identifying and correcting a failure's root cause. The author describes a new algorithm that promises to relieve programmers of the hit-or- miss approach to debugging. Delta Debugging uses the results of automated testing to systematically narrow the set of failure-inducing circumstances. Programmers supply a test function for each bug and hardcode it into any imperative language. The test function checks a set of changes to determine if the failure is present or if the outcome is unresolved, then feeds that information to the Delta Debugging code. As we discover more about the structure of these circumstances and the resulting causality chain, we come closer to passing much of the boredom and monotony of debugging onto machines. Debugging can be just as disciplined, systematic, and quantifiable as any other area of software engineering--which means that we should eventually be able to automate at least part of it. Ultimately, debugging may become as automated as testing--not only detecting failures, but also revealing how they came to be.