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ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Patterns in Dynamic Slices to Assist in Automated Debugging

Burbrink, Joshua W
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406811180

Abstract Details

2014, MS, University of Cincinnati, Engineering and Applied Science: Computer Science.
The process of manually debugging programs can be difficult and time consuming. The goal of this thesis is to aid developers in debugging their crashed programs by identifying common programming mistakes using information collected during the execution of the crashed program. Specifically, the solution proposed by this thesis calculates a dynamic slice with respect to conditions at the time of the crash and inspects the dynamic slice for characteristics that are only present when certain types of programming errors occur. Common programing mistakes explored by this thesis include: uninitialized heap variables, uninitialized stack variables, dangling pointers, and stack overflow. A prototype, based on the GNU Debugger, was developed to implement the concepts of this thesis and was used to identify common programming mistakes made in a set of example C programs. Experimental results showed that the solutions presented in this thesis performed very well. The prototype was able to identify all occurrences of uninitialized stack variables, uninitialized heap variables, and stack overflow, and only a few instances of dangling pointers were missed. Upon identifying a common programming mistake in the dynamic slice, the prototype was able to produce a high level debug report indicating source code lines relevant to the coding mistake.
John Franco, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Raj Bhatnagar, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Paul Talaga, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
40 p.
Computer Science
Dynamic Slice; x86; Automated Debugging; Crash Analysis

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Burbrink, J. W. (2014). Patterns in Dynamic Slices to Assist in Automated Debugging [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406811180

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Burbrink, Joshua. Patterns in Dynamic Slices to Assist in Automated Debugging. 2014. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406811180.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Burbrink, Joshua. "Patterns in Dynamic Slices to Assist in Automated Debugging." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1406811180

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1406811180
323
© 2014, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Patterns in Dynamic Slices to Assist in Automated Debugging by Joshua W Burbrink is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.