Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

A large fraction of the time spent on software development and system design projects is used for debugging. However, effective debugging techniques are not as well-studied or formalized as those for writing code. Instead, debugging is typically tackled with ad-hoc and idiosyncratic approaches. This talk will present a systematic approach to debugging software and hardware in order to locate bugs more effectively. It will also describe a taxonomy to classify such “insects,” which should enable better code-writing practices.

Debugging faulty hardware, single executables, multi-threaded programs, and distributed applications will be covered. Tips and tricks for software and hardware debugging using tools like GDB, Wireshark, gperftools, and hardware protocol analyzers will also be presented, along with examples of both common and unusual bugs caught in the wild.