Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging / Edition 2

by Andreas Zeller

Overview

Why Programs Fail, winner of the Jolt Productivity Award, has been freshly updated to bring readers up-to-speed on all the new methodologies that will help save them, their companies, and consumers a lot of headaches. Find out about bugs in computer programs, how to find them, how to reproduce them, and how to fix them in such a way that they do not occur anymore. A new edition of the first comprehensive book on systematic debugging, covers a wide range of tools and techniques ranging from hands-on observation to fully automated diagnoses, and includes instructions for building automated debuggers. This discussion is built upon a solid theory of how failures occur and how to fix them, rather than relying on seat-of-the-pants techniques, which are of little help with large software systems or to those learning to program.

The fully updated second edition includes a new chapter on Learning From Mistakes – how to leverage change and bug databases to learn where earlier errors were and where future ones will be. Cutting-edge approaches to reproduce crashes are explained, new insights on how to report problems are explained, and new material on tracking origins is included. All across the book, tools, references, and exercises have been updated to reflect the state of the art.

• The new edition of this award-winning productivity-booster is for any developer who has ever been frustrated by elusive bugs
• Brand new material demonstrates cutting-edge debugging techniques and tools, enabling readers to put the latest time-saving developments to work for them
• Learn by doing. New exercises and detailed examples focus on emerging tools and environments, including ReCRASH, FindBUGS, and the WHYLINE.

Supplemental material available at www.whyprogramsfail.com

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780123745156
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	06/12/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	801,740
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Andreas Zeller is a full professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany. His research concerns the analysis of large software systems and their development process; his students are funded by companies like Google, Microsoft, or SAP. In 2010, Zeller was inducted as Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to automated debugging and mining software archives. In 2011, he received an ERC Advanced Grant, Europe's highest and most prestigious individual research grant, for work on specification mining and test case generation. His book "Why programs fail", the "standard reference on debugging", obtained the 2006 Software Development Jolt Productivity Award.

Table of Contents

How Failures Come to Be; Tracking Problems; Reproducing Problems; Simplifying Problems; Scientific Method; Deducing Errors; Observing Facts; Tracking Origins; Asserting Expectations; Detecting Anomalies; Causes and Effects; Isolating Failure Causes; Isolating Cause-Effect Chains; Fixing the Defect; Appendix A Formal Definitions; A.1 Delta Debugging; A.2 Memory Graphs; A.3 Cause-Effect Chains; Glossary; Bibliography; Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

The award-winning guide to faster and easier debugging is now updated with the latest tools and techniques

Editorial Reviews

James Madison wrote: ‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary.’ If he lived today, Madison might have written: ‘If software developers were angels, debugging would be unnecessary.’ Most of us, however, make mistakes, and many of us even make errors while designing and writing software. Our mistakes need to be found and fixed, an activity called debugging that originated with the first computer programs. Today every computer program written is also debugged, but debugging is not a widely studied or taught skill. Few books, beyond this one, present a systematic approach to finding and fixing programming errors.” —from the foreword by James Larus, Microsoft Research

"Andreas Zeller seeks to equip you with a comprehensive arsenal of techniques and the appropriate mind-sets for employing them." —Rick Wayne, Software Development, January 2006

From the Publisher