DebugAdvisor: A Recommender System for Debugging

Overview

In large software development projects, when a programmer is assigned a bug to x, she typically spends a lot of time searching (in an ad-hoc manner) for instances from the past where similar bugs have been debugged, analyzed and resolved. Systematic search tools that allow the programmer to express the context of the current bug, and search through diverse data repositories associated with large projects can greatly improve the productivity of debugging. This paper presents the design, implementation and experience from such a search tool called DebugAdvisor. The context of a bug includes all the information a programmer has about the bug, including natural language text, textual rendering of core dumps, debugger output etc.