Debugging Reinvented: Asking and Answering Why and Why Not Questions about Program Behavior [1/17]

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 17:04

Most software undergoes a brief period of rapid development, followed by a much longer period of maintenance and adaptation. As a result, software developers spend most of their time exploring a system's underlying source code to determine the parts of the system that are relevant to their tasks. Because these parts are often distributed throughout a system's modules, and because they can interact in complex and unpredictable ways, this process of understanding a program's execution can be extremely difficult. The primary cause of this difficulty is that developers must answer their questions about a system's behavior by guessing. For example, a developer wondering, Why