Debugging Techniques for Communicating, Loosely-Coupled Processes.

Abstract

This thesis describes work done on debugging techniques and tools for communicating, loosely-coupled processes. Our work is intended to reduce the apparent complexity of large systems of communicating programs by regarding only the interprocess activities of such programs. The use of multiple, communicating processes as a model of computation allows for a very clean 'cut' of what information is interesting for debugging and what is not. Our approach to debugging is to provide the user with information about how sets of these processes behave rather than what each program associated with each process does. Our tools provide various primitives for manipulating the interprocess activities of processes. We provide nothing to access the source code of any program. Our tools include a debugger program, a mechanism to fire and execute interprocess debugging demons and the ability to obtain transcripts of interprocess activities. The debugger provides commands for the user at a terminal for creating and manipulating individual interprocess events. Demons are an event-driven mechanism used to automatically monitor and modify interprocess events.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1981
Accession Number
ADA127117

Entities

People

  • Edward Tucker Smith

Organizations

  • University of Rochester

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Classification
  • Complex Systems
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Debugging
  • Language
  • Lists (Data Structures)
  • Operating Systems
  • Programming Languages
  • Side Effects
  • Simulations
  • Theses
  • Universities

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.