First Infrastructure and Experimentation in Echo-debugging

TL;DR

This paper introduces echo-debugger, a tool for parallel execution comparison and the CDM algorithm to identify control-flow divergences, aiming to improve debugging efficiency by leveraging previous code versions.

Contribution

It presents the architecture of a novel debugging tool and the CDM algorithm for detecting control-flow divergences between program executions.

Findings

Successfully identified control-flow divergences in a bug scenario.

Demonstrated the potential of parallel execution comparison for debugging.

Provided a foundational architecture for future debugging tools.

Abstract

As applications get developed, bugs inevitably get introduced. Often, it is unclear why a given code change introduced a given bug. To find this causal relation and more effectively debug, developers can leverage the existence of a previous version of the code, without the bug. But traditional debug-ging tools are not designed for this type of work, making this operation tedious. In this article, we propose as exploratory work the echo-debugger, a tool to debug two different executions in parallel, and the Convergence Divergence Mapping (CDM) algorithm to locate all the control-flow divergences and convergences of these executions. In this exploratory work, we present the architecture of the tool and a scenario to solve a non trivial bug.