Welcome to "The Debugging Book"! Software has bugs, and finding bugs can involve lots of effort. This book addresses this problem by automating software debugging, specifically by locating errors and their causes automatically. Recent years have seen the development of novel techniques that lead to dramatic improvements in automated software debugging. They now are mature enough to be assembled in a book – even with executable code.

import bookutils.setup

from bookutils import YouTubeVideo
YouTubeVideo("-nOxI6Ev_I4")

You can use this book in multiple ways:

• You can read chapters in your browser. Check out the list of chapters in the menu above, or start right away with the introduction to debugging or how debuggers work. All code is available for download.

• You can interact with chapters as Jupyter Notebooks (beta). This allows you to edit and extend the code, experimenting live in your browser. Select "Binder" at the top of any chapter. Try interacting with the introduction to interactive debuggers.

• You can use the code in your own projects. You can download and install the code and/or the notebooks on your machine. These code files can be executed, yielding (hopefully) the same results as the notebooks.

This work is designed as a textbook for a course in software debugging; as supplementary material in a software testing or software engineering course; and as a resource for software developers. We cover fault localization, program slicing, input reduction, automated repair, and much more, illustrating all techniques with code examples that you can try out yourself.

This book is work in progress. All chapters planned are out now, but we keep on refining text and code with minor and major releases. To get notified on updates, follow us on Mastodon.