Quantum computers are becoming more mainstream. As more programmers are starting to look at writing quantum programs, they need to test and debug their code. In this paper, we discuss various use-cases for quantum computers, either standalone or as part of a System of Systems. Based on these use-cases, we discuss some testing and debugging tactics that one can leverage to ensure the quality of the quantum software. We also highlight quantum-computer-specific issues and list novel techniques that are needed to address these issues. The practitioners can readily apply some of these tactics to their process of writing quantum programs, while researchers can learn about opportunities for future work.
Many researchers have studied the behaviour of successful developers while debugging desktop software. In this paper, we investigate the embedded-software debugging by intermediate programmers through an exploratory study. The bugs are semantic low-level errors, and the participants are students who completed a real-time operating systems course in addition to five other programming courses. We compare between the behaviour involved in successful debugging attempts versus unsuccessful ones. We describe some characteristics of smooth and successful debugging behaviour.
Debugging is considered as a rigorous but important feature of software engineering process. Since more than a decade, the software engineering research community is exploring different techniques for removal of faults from programs but it is quite difficult to overcome all the faults of software programs. Thus, it is still remains as a real challenge for software debugging and maintenance community. In this paper, we briefly introduced software anomalies and faults classification and then explained different fault localization models using theory of diagnosis. Furthermore, we compared and con…
Determining whether a configurable software system has a performance bug or it was misconfigured is often challenging. While there are numerous debugging techniques that can support developers in this task, there is limited empirical evidence of how useful the techniques are to address the actual needs that developers have when debugging the performance of configurable software systems; most techniques are often evaluated in terms of technical accuracy instead of their usability. In this paper, we take a human-centered approach to identify, design, implement, and evaluate a solution to support…
Institute for Formal Models and Verification, Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰内斯·开普勒大学林茨分校形式模型与验证研究所）；Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学计算机科学系）
This paper develops automated testing and debugging techniques for answer set solver development. We describe a flexible grammar-based black-box ASP fuzz testing tool which is able to reveal various defects such as unsound and incomplete behavior, i.e. invalid answer sets and inability to find existing solutions, in state-of-the-art answer set solver implementations. Moreover, we develop delta debugging techniques for shrinking failure-inducing inputs on which solvers exhibit defective behavior. In particular, we develop a delta debugging algorithm in the context of answer set solving, and eva…
In this paper we outline an approach of applying model-based diagnosis to the field of automatic software debugging of hardware designs. We present our value-level model for debugging VHDL-RTL designs and show how to localize the erroneous component responsible for an observed misbehavior. Furthermore, we discuss an extension of our model that supports the debugging of sequential circuits, not only at a given point in time, but also allows for considering the temporal behavior of VHDL-RTL designs. The introduced model is capable of handling state inherently present in every sequential circuit.…
Software dependence networks are shown to be scale-free and asymmetric. We then study how software components are affected by the failure of one of them, and the inverse problem of locating the faulty component. Software at all levels is fragile with respect to the failure of a random single component. Locating a faulty component is easy if the failures only affect their nearest neighbors, while it is hard if the failures propagate further.
Reproducibility and comparability of empirical results are at the core tenet of the scientific method in any scientific field. To ease reproducibility of empirical studies, several benchmarks in software engineering research, such as Defects4J, have been developed and widely used. For quantum software engineering research, however, no benchmark has been established yet. In this position paper, we propose a new benchmark -- named QBugs -- which will provide experimental subjects and an experimental infrastructure to ease the evaluation of new research and the reproducibility of previously publi…
A number of automated techniques and tools were proposed in the research literature over the years which aim to support the spreadsheet developer in the process of testing and debugging a faulty spreadsheet. One underlying assumption of many of these approaches is that the spreadsheet developer is capable of providing test cases or is at least reliably able to determine whether a calculated value in a certain cell is correct given the current set of inputs. Since real-world spreadsheets can be complex, we argue that these assumptions might be too strong in some situations. We therefore propose…
Correctness and robustness are essential for logic synthesis applications, but they are often only tested with a limited set of benchmarks. Moreover, when the application fails on a large benchmark, the debugging process may be tedious and time-consuming. In some fields such as compiler construction, automatic testing and debugging tools are well-developed to support developers and provide minimal guarantees on program quality. In this paper, we adapt fuzz testing and delta debugging techniques and specialize them for gate-level netlists commonly used in logic synthesis. Our toolkit improves o…
Testability is the probability whether tests will detect a fault, given that a fault in the program exists. How efficiently the faults will be uncovered depends upon the testability of the software. Various researchers have proposed qualitative and quantitative techniques to improve and measure the testability of software. In literature, a plethora of reliability growth models have been used to assess and measure the quantitative quality assessment of software during testing and operational phase. The knowledge about failure distribution and their complexity can improve the testability of soft…
Graz University of Technology（格拉茨工业大学）；Siemens Energy AG（西门子能源股份公司）；University of Sevilla（塞维利亚大学）
Variability models (e.g., feature models) are a common way for the representation of variabilities and commonalities of software artifacts. Such models can be translated to a logical representation and thus allow different operations for quality assurance and other types of model property analysis. Specifically, complex and often large-scale feature models can become faulty, i.e., do not represent the expected variability properties of the underlying software artifact. In this paper, we introduce DirectDebug which is a direct diagnosis approach to the automated testing and debugging of variabi…
A program fails. Under which circumstances does this failure occur? One single algorithm, the delta debugging algorithm, suffices to determine these failure-inducing circumstances. Delta debugging tests a program systematically and automatically to isolate failure-inducing circumstances such as the program input, changes to the program code, or executed statements.
Debugging denotes the process of detecting root causes of unexpected observable behaviors in programs, such as a program crash, an unexpected output value being produced or an assertion violation. Debugging of program errors is a difficult task and often takes a significant amount of time in the software development life cycle. In the context of embedded software, the probability of bugs is quite high. Due to requirements of low code size and less resource consumption, embedded softwares typically do away with a lot of sanity checks during development time. This leads to high chance of errors …
Design of large software systems requires rigorous application of software engineering methods covering all phases of the software process. Debugging during the early design phases is extremely important, because late bug-fixes are expensive. In this paper, we describe an approach which facilitates debugging of UML requirements and designs. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a set of notations for object-orient design of a software system. We have developed an algorithm which translates requirement specifications in the form of annotated sequence diagrams into structured statecharts. This …
Debugging is an unavoidable and most crucial aspect of software development life cycle. Especially when it comes the turn of embedded one. Due to the requirements of low code size and less resource consumption, the embedded softwares need to be upgraded all the time involving obvious change of code during development phase. This leads the huge risk of intrusion of bugs into the code at production time. In this paper we propose an approach of debugging embedded program in pseudo format, incorporating invariant analysis. Our methodology works on top of Daikon, a popular invariant analyzer. We ha…
DDOR: Delta Debugging for Explainable Overrefusal Testing and Repair
Southeast University（东南大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理学院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute of Industrial Control Technology（湖州工业控制技术研究所）
This paper presents a data-driven framework to improve the trustworthiness of US tax preparation software systems. Given the legal implications of bugs in such software on its users, ensuring compliance and trustworthiness of tax preparation software is of paramount importance. The key barriers in developing debugging aids for tax preparation systems are the unavailability of explicit specifications and the difficulty of obtaining oracles. We posit that, since the US tax law adheres to the legal doctrine of precedent, the specifications about the outcome of tax preparation software for an indi…
A new approach called RESID is proposed in this paper for estimating reliability of a software allowing for imperfect debugging. Unlike earlier approaches based on counting number of bugs or modelling inter-failure time gaps, RESID focuses on the probability of "bugginess" of different parts of a program buggy. This perspective allows an easy way to incorporate the structure of the software under test, as well as imperfect debugging. One main design objective behind RESID is ease of implementation in practical scenarios.
Context. Recent studies show that developers spend most of their programming time testing, verifying and debugging software. As applications become more and more complex, developers demand more advanced debugging support to ease the software development process. Inquiry. Since the 70's many debugging solutions were introduced. Amongst them, online debuggers provide a good insight on the conditions that led to a bug, allowing inspection and interaction with the variables of the program. However, most of the online debugging solutions introduce \textit{debugging interference} to the execution of…
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Software debugging has been shown to utilize upwards of half of developers' time. Yet, machine programming (MP), the field concerned with the automation of software (and hardware) development, has recently made strides in both research and production-quality automated debugging systems. In this paper we present ControlFlag, a self-supervised MP system that aims to improve debugging by attempting to detect idiosyncratic pattern violations in software control structures. ControlFlag also suggests possible corrections in the event an anomalous pattern is detected. We present ControlFlag's design …
Despite the advancements in software testing, bugs still plague deployed software and result in crashes in production. When debugging issues -- sometimes caused by "heisenbugs" -- there is the need to interpret core dumps and reproduce the issue offline on the same binary deployed. This requires the entire toolchain (compiler, linker, debugger) to correctly generate and use debug information. Little attention has been devoted to checking that such information is correctly preserved by modern toolchains' optimization stages. This is particularly important as managing debug information in optimi…
With the advance in quantum computing in recent years, quantum software becomes vital for exploring the full potential of quantum computing systems. Quantum programming is different from classical programming, for example, the state of a quantum program is probabilistic in nature, and a quantum computer is error-prone due to the instability of quantum mechanisms. Therefore, the characteristics of bugs in quantum software projects may be very different from that of classical software projects. This work aims to understand the characteristics of bugs in quantum software projects, in order to pro…
Automated software debugging is a crucial task for improving the productivity of software developers. Many neural-based techniques have been proven effective for debugging-related tasks such as bug localization and program repair (or bug fixing). However, these techniques often focus only on either one of them or approach them in a stage-wise manner, ignoring the mutual benefits between them. In this work, we propose a novel unified \emph{Detect-Localize-Repair} framework based on a pretrained programming language model CodeT5 to seamlessly address these tasks, named CodeT5-DLR. Specifically, …
Realistic benchmarks of reproducible bugs and fixes are vital to good experimental evaluation of debugging and testing approaches. However, there is no suitable benchmark suite that can systematically evaluate the debugging and testing methods of quantum programs until now. This paper proposes Bugs4Q, a benchmark of thirty-six real, manually validated Qiskit bugs from four popular Qiskit elements (Terra, Aer, Ignis, and Aqua), supplemented with the test cases for reproducing buggy behaviors. Bugs4Q also provides interfaces for accessing the buggy and fixed versions of the Qiskit programs and e…
Defects4J has enabled numerous software testing and debugging research work since its introduction. A large part of its contribution, and the resulting popularity, lies in the clear separation and distillation of the root cause of each individual test failure based on careful manual analysis, which in turn allowed researchers to easily study individual faults in isolation. However, in a realistic debugging scenario, multiple faults can coexist and affect test results collectively. Study of automated debugging techniques for these situations, such as failure clustering or fault localisation for…
In the domain of Software Engineering, program analysis and understanding has been considered to be a very challenging task since decade, as it demands dedicated time and efforts. The analysis of source code may occasionally be comparatively easier due to its static nature, however, the back end code (Bytecode), especially in terms of Java programming, is complicated to be analysed. In this paper, we present a methodological approach towards understanding the Bytecode of Java programs. We put forward a framework for the debugging process of Java Bytecode. Furthermore, we discuss the debugging …
