Divergence-Driven Debugging: Understanding Behavioral Changes Between Two Program Versions

Daily software changes present an inherent risk of introducing bugs. To understand such bugs, it is crucial to understand why specific changes introduced the bugs. This is difficult and time-consuming. We propose Divergence-Driven Debugging, an approach using a debugger for detecting execution divergences between two versions of the same program. Developers can explore both versions' execution in full and compare them based on the detected divergences. We evaluate our approach on a bug scenario and show that our debugger highlights the live state and behavior required to understand why the changes produce the bug and to identify its root cause.