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Introduction

Introduction April 1997/Vol. 40, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM Scandal AND No longer limited to trial-and-error methods, Debugging Henry Lieberman, Guest Editor of bug-hunting. THE What to Do About It frustrated programmers now have debugging tools that provide active assistance in the detective work D EBUGGING IS THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF computer science. Despite the progress we have made in the past 30 years ” faster computers, networking, easy-touse graphical interfaces, and everything else ”we still face some embarrassing facts about software development. First, computer programs often don ™t work as they should, making software development costly. And too much buggy software reaches COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM April 1997/Vol. 40, No. 4 Bordering on scandal is the fact that the computer science community has largely ignored the debugging problem. end users, leading to needless expense and frustration. That ™s unfortunate, but most surprising is the fact that when something does go wrong, the people who write the programs still lack good ways of figuring out exactly what went wrong. Debugging is still, as it was 30 years ago, largely a matter of trial and error. Bordering on scandal is the fact that the computer science community as http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Communications of the ACM Association for Computing Machinery

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0001-0782
DOI
10.1145/248448.248455
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

April 1997/Vol. 40, No. 4 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM Scandal AND No longer limited to trial-and-error methods, Debugging Henry Lieberman, Guest Editor of bug-hunting. THE What to Do About It frustrated programmers now have debugging tools that provide active assistance in the detective work D EBUGGING IS THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF computer science. Despite the progress we have made in the past 30 years ” faster computers, networking, easy-touse graphical interfaces, and everything else ”we still face some embarrassing facts about software development. First, computer programs often don ™t work as they should, making software development costly. And too much buggy software reaches COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM April 1997/Vol. 40, No. 4 Bordering on scandal is the fact that the computer science community has largely ignored the debugging problem. end users, leading to needless expense and frustration. That ™s unfortunate, but most surprising is the fact that when something does go wrong, the people who write the programs still lack good ways of figuring out exactly what went wrong. Debugging is still, as it was 30 years ago, largely a matter of trial and error. Bordering on scandal is the fact that the computer science community as

Journal

Communications of the ACMAssociation for Computing Machinery

Published: Apr 1, 1997

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