Ivan Beschastnikh - Software comprehension and diagnosis by modeling and capture-and-replay

Описание: Ivan Beschastnikh presents as part of the UBC Department of Computer Science's Faculty Lecture Series, January 30, 2014.

Understanding what a software system does, or doesn't do, is an essential task that developers and end-users carry out on a daily basis. Software comprehension is a broad topic --- ranging from understanding the social forces underlying software production (who changed my code, and why?), to how the software works and when it breaks (will my WiFi start working if I reboot my laptop?). In this talk I'll discuss some of my recent, post-PhD, work that uses program analysis to help end-users diagnose and understand network issues, (why can't I connect to MySQL?), to guide developers in assessing program portability (why does a web-page render differently across browsers?), and to help developers make sense of distributed system execution (do the nodes in the system communicate in a scatter-gather pattern?). The key to all three of these projects is some form of software modeling and the capture-and-replay of a program's runtime behavior.