Abstract
This paper presents preliminary findings from an ethnographic study of distributed, parallel debugging in an open source software (OSS) community. Focusing on the OSS developers’ daily activities, I propose the concept of making software debuggable. In so doing, I see a somewhat different story than common narratives of debugging in current OSS research, which describes distributed, parallel debugging as a set of highly cohesive tasks within loosely couple groups. I find that parallel, distributed debugging is rather a closely coupled collective process of producing and interpreting debug texts with high cohesion between the activities of reporting, finding, and understanding bugs.
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© 2006 International Federation for Information Processing
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Østerlie, T. (2006). Producing and Interpreting Debug Texts. In: Damiani, E., Fitzgerald, B., Scacchi, W., Scotto, M., Succi, G. (eds) Open Source Systems. OSS 2006. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, vol 203. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34226-5_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34226-5_34
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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