A survey on algorithmic debugging strategies

Algorithmic debugging is a debugging technique that has been extended to practically all programming paradigms. Roughly speaking, the technique constructs an internal representation of all (sub)computations performed during the execution of a buggy program; and then, it asks the programmer about the correctness of such computations. The answers of the programmer guide the search for the bug until it is isolated by discarding correct parts of the program. After twenty years of research in algorithmic debugging many different techniques have appeared to improve the original proposal. Surprisingly, no study exists that joins together all these techniques and compares their advantages and their performance. This article presents a study that compares all current algorithmic debugging techniques and analyzes their differences and their costs. The research identifies the dimensions on which each strategy relies. This information allows us to combine the strong points of different strategies.

► We compare all current search strategies for algorithmic debugging.
► Advantages, problems and costs are studied for each strategy with a common example.
► A new hybrid strategy is proposed combining strong points of different strategies.
► An empirical comparison of search strategies is presented.