My hairiest bug war stories

Abstract

COMPUTER PROGRAMming and debugging However, two exceptions to this observation are the detailed account by Knuth of using a logbook to document all the errors he encountered over a 10-year development period working on TeX [6] and a logbook of the development efforts of a team implementing the S Smalltalk-80 virtual machine Such self-reports and logs are valuable sources on the nature of software design, development, and maintenance. The work reported here seeks to expand the single-user-logbook approach to investigate the phenomenology of debugging across a large population of users, aiming to understand and address the problems of professional programmers working on very large programming tasks.