Debugging Revisited - Cloud-based debugging heatmap aims to show developers which apps are ‘on fire’

guest · Oct 15, 2020

Cloud-based debugging heatmap aims to show developers which apps are ‘on fire’
October 14, 2020
https://www.scmagazine.com/home/sec...ms-to-show-developers-which-apps-are-on-fire/

Debugging can be a bit like detective work. First a developer discovers a faulty function or webpage through testing, bug reports or user feedback. They then try to reproduce it, develop a hypothesis for the underlying cause, root around the relevant code to make changes and then test to see if it fixes the problem.

There’s a lot of time, legwork and communication involved in the initial information gathering stages of the process. Rookout, a cybersecurity startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel, rolled out a new cloud-based debugging heatmap Thursday designed to quickly identify the buggiest applications in an enterprise and cut down on the time developer teams spend troubleshooting.

“Whether finding the source of a bug or evaluating a potential change to a program, the answers come from many sources,” researchers write. “There is often not enough information about a bug or desired fix, necessitating communication with team members, be it face-to-face or via email, between external specialists or customers.”
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The idea behind the heatmap is to automate some of that early discovery process and make it easier for enterprise to identify hotspots where functionality is most affected and more quickly deploy organizational resources as needed.

“We know which files in the code our customers have set a breakpoint, we know which files in the code that breakpoint was activated and sent data,” He said.
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He places potential customers for the heatmap into two buckets: for some, it can be useful to validate existing anecdotal or instinctual beliefs about where the biggest problem spots in their application environments lie. Others “just don’t know how bad things are” and would benefit from a higher baseline situational awareness. Either way, the goal is to cut down on hours of extraneous research and data collection that goes into the debugging process.

“What the new heatmap does for that second group…is it makes the un-measurable measurable,” Keret said. “It gives them a true sense of ‘this is the problem, this is how deep it is, and this is how much it can improve if you enhance your debugging flow.'”
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Research (Microsoft): "Debugging Revisited - Toward Understanding the Debugging Needs of Contemporary Software Developers"
(PDF - 378 KB): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Layman-ESEM2013.pdf

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