A pragmatic approach for debugging parameter-driven software

Abstract

Debugging a software system is a difficult and time consuming task. This is in particular true for control software in technical systems. Such software typically has a very long life cycle, has been programmed by engineers and not computer scientists, and has been extended numerous times to adapt to a changing environment and new technical products. As a consequence, the software is often not in an ideal condition. Additionally, such software often faces real-time requirements, which often makes it impossible to use dynamic techniques (e. g., single-stepping or tracing). Technically, such software is often realized in C/C++ in a rather imperative programming style. Adaptation and extension is often done by adding configuration parameters. As a consequence, checking for correctness as well as debugging requires to consider the source code as well as its configuration parameters. In this paper, we propose a pragmatic approach to debugging such software. The approach was designed such that (a) it does not require any understanding of the software before starting, and (b) that it can be easily used by programmers and not only by experts. We evaluated the approach on an artificial but realistic case study provided by Robert Bosch GmbH.