Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging

Debugging has undergone a sea change in recent years. Increasing processing power has allowed for the creation of much more sophisticated software tools for the analysis and debugging of programs. This in turn has allowed debugging to graduate from a black art to a systematic discipline. The time is right to summarize this new advanced approach to debugging. Why Programs Fail is about bugs in computer programs, how to reproduce them, how to find them, and how to fix them in such a way that they do not occur anymore. This is the first comprehensive book on systematic debugging and 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, rather than relying on seat-of-the-pants techniques, which are of little help with large software systems or to those learning to program. Andreas Zeller is well known in the programming community for developing the GNU Data Display Debugger (DDD), a tool that visualizes the data structures of a program while it is running. Over 250,000 users as well as all major software companies use DDD for software development. Zeller is also the creator of the popular "Ask Igor" website that will automatically debug programs over the web, and he regularly speaks and consults in the USA.