Software Testing: Debugging Tools Overview

Software Testing: Other Debugging Tools

• Log Files: Files containing text and values written by programs as they execute.
• Application: Debugging distributed programs working across multiple computers, often used for production systems monitoring.
• Benefits: Continuous information gathering, long-term data storage, and output collection under specific conditions.
• Log File Information: Includes the computer name, program name, thread ID, timestamp (millisecond precision), function name, file name, line number, and informational messages (variable values).
• Log4c (Log4j): A logging framework with three severity levels (Error, Warning, Info). Logs can be filtered by severity, enabled/disabled, and auto-flushed for efficiency.

Overview of Debugging Tools

• Assertions: A programming technique used to include checks in code, halting execution if a condition is false.
• Usage: #include <assert.h> followed by assert(condition). If condition is false, the program stops and reports the error.
• Lint: A program checking source code for various errors and potential problems, offering clues about bugs. Available for many programming languages. (e.g., CPPcheck for C++)

Other Debugging Tools

• Core Dumps: A copy of the program's memory at a specific moment (e.g., a program crash). Used for post-mortem analysis, usually in binary form. Manual review is laborious. Tools automate the process.

• Debug and Release Builds: Different configurations for building executable code.

  • Debug: Includes debugging information (e.g., program database), no optimization, and runtime checks for errors, slower than release.
  • Release: No debugging information, includes optimization for speed.

• Conditional Compilation: Using preprocessor directives (e.g., #ifdef, #define) to include or exclude code segments based on conditions, improving code modularity and flexibility while maintaining debugging potential.

Other Topics

• Compiled vs. Interpreted: Compiled languages (e.g., C++) go through the entire code at once, highlighting errors before execution. Interpreted languages (e.g., Python), execute line by line, delaying errors until runtime.
• Strongly vs. Weakly Typed: Strongly typed languages require variable types to be precise; errors occur at compile time. Weakly typed languages allow flexible types; errors may only show during execution, even after months of use.

This quiz covers various debugging tools used in software testing, such as log files and assertions. Learn about the benefits of log files, the Log4j framework, and how assertions can help in code verification. Test your understanding of these critical concepts in debugging distributed systems.