This advanced course (Weiterführende Vorlesung, 6 CP) teaches advanced debugging methods—from interactive debugging tools over program analysis to experimental methods.
Lecture Topics and Dates
Your lecturer is Prof. Andreas Zeller. Your tutor is Andrzej Wasylkowski.
Lectures and Tutorials
All lectures and tutorials will take place in Building E1 3, HS 003.
- Tuesday, 8:30–10:00
- Thursday, 8:30–10:00
Lecture start: Tuesday, 2008-10-21. Details about the lectures and tutorials will be provided during this first lecture.
Topics and Scheduling
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| 2008-10-21 | About the Course · How Failures Come to Be |
| 2008-10-23 | Tracking Problems · Making Programs Fail |
| 2008-10-28 | Tutorial: Introduction to Python (recorded terminal session) |
| 2008-10-30 | Reproducing Problems |
| 2008-11-04 | Simplifying Problems |
| 2008-11-06 | Tutorial: Project 1 |
| 2008-11-11 | The Scientific Method |
| 2008-11-13 | Deducing Errors |
| 2008-11-18 | Tutorial: Questions and Answers (Project 1) |
| 2008-11-20 | Mining Anomalies |
| 2008-11-25 | Observing Facts |
| 2008-11-27 | Comparing Coverage |
| 2008-12-02 | Tutorial: Project 2 |
| 2008-12-04 | Asserting Expectations |
| 2008-12-09 | System Assertions |
| 2008-12-11 | Reproducing Crashes |
| 2008-12-16 | Detecting Anomalies |
| 2008-12-18 | Tutorial: Project 3 |
| 2009-01-06 | Causes and Effects |
| 2009-01-08 | Isolating Failure Causes |
| 2009-01-13 | Isolating Cause-Effect Chains |
| 2009-01-15 | Tutorial: Project 4 |
| 2009-01-20 | Locating Failure Causes |
| 2009-01-22 | Fixing the Defect · Learning from Mistakes |
| 2009-01-27 | Learning from Software |
| 2009-01-29 | Seeding Bugs to Find Bugs |
Lecture Notes
The book "Why Programs Fail: A Guide to Systematic Debugging" is the base of this course. It contains all the material required for the excercises and the final exam.
Exercises
You have to pass four programming assignments, every project will be graded.
- Simplifying Input
- from 2008-11-06
- to 2008-11-19
- Results
- Comparing Coverage
- from 2008-11-27
- to 2008-12-19
- Examples: obtaining and comparing coverage (UPDATE: with a mistake corrected)
- Results
- Detecting Anomalies
- from 2008-12-18
- to 2009-01-09
- Results
- Cause-Effect Chains
- from 2009-01-15
- to 2009-02-13
- Results
Oral exams
The exams will take place during the week from 2009-02-02 to 2009-02-06.
Final scheduling of the exams is available here.