I’m happy to announce that DExTer (Debugging Experience Tester) is now available on github at https://github.com/SNSystems/dexter . To quote from the project readme:
“DExTer is a suite of tools used to evaluate the “User Debugging Experience”. DExTer drives an external debugger, running on small test programs, and collects information on the behavior at each debugger step to provide quantitative values that indicate the quality of the debugging experience.”
My hope is that it will be a useful tool to help find both existing cases of poor debug experience as well as spot any regressions in that experience as they occur. As I’ve previously stated, I think that this should be nicely complementary to other utlities such as debugify and DIVA. We also intend to contribute continuous DExTer testing of LLVM trunk in the future so we’ll be able to immediately track any differences in the debugging experience score down to individual commits as they happen.
For now we’ve been using it to find small cases where debugging of clang compiled programs at “-O2 -g” is significantly worse than with “-O0 -g” in ways that can hopefully be resolved through more careful preservation of debug data. We’re using the following meta-bug to keep track of the issues that we find (and hopefully fix): https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38768
The original slides and poster that I presented at EuroLLVM earlier this year can be found here:
slides: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-04/slides/Bedwell-Measuring_the_User_Debugging_Experience.pdf
poster: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-04/slides/Bedwell-Measuring_the_User_Debugging_Experience_poster.png
Thanks to everyone who’s helped out with the development of DExTer so far, especially to Stephen Wilks who worked closely with me on the initial development of the project.
Thanks,
-Greg