ACF: Infrastructure for Debugging Long-Running Systems with Tracing and Unit Test Execution
TL;DR
A debugging workflow that combines dynamic analysis with directed unit tests is introduced, and ACF, an infrastructure for automating this workflow is presented, indicating that ACF can help developers to isolate specific inputs causing an error, thus simplifying the process of locating faulty statements.
Abstract
Debugging software systems is a tedious and time-consuming activity, which includes reproduction of the observed errors, inspecting log files, usage of interactive debuggers, and running tests — all that is done with the goal of identifying a root cause. The process of debugging is even more challenging in the case of large systems with long computations, where programs (and test suites) may run for hours. We introduce a debugging workflow that combines dynamic analysis with directed unit tests, and present ACF, an infrastructure for automating this workflow. Dynamic analysis collects runtime data about procedure calls, their argument values, and relevant program states during execution of a target system. Tests use the recorded values as inputs. We have implemented the ACF infrastructure for C/C++ programs on top of LLVM. Our experiments with real-world systems indicate that ACF can help developers to isolate specific inputs causing an error, thus simplifying the process of locating faulty statements.
