Hi!
Collecting good bug reports from users is a challenge, as most users are unable (or unwilling) to inspect problems in depth. Existing tools to automatically report program failures are often problematic as they either produce superficial reports or are prone to leaking private information (i.e. by including a full snapshot of the process address space in the form of a core dump).
At TUM, we are developing Monkey[1], a free software tool that automatically generates high-quality privacy-preserving bug reports (for C code) which we hope to use for GNUnet and Tor eventually. (It runs with GNUnet and Tor already, but might need more work prior to real-world use.) We have reproduced and analyzed a set of real-world bugs using the system and would now like to study how well developers can find the bugs using the extracted information.
Please participate in our public "survey" (or rather, experiment) where we measure your performance at identifying bugs based on crash reports collected via different methods, including traditional stack traces, core dumps (accessed via a live gdb session) and of course Monkey.
So if you can spare the time, please help our efforts by participating in our survey[1] and passing the link to your colleagues and friends. (Who finds more bugs faster?)
[0]: https://gnunet.org/monkey/ [1]: https://gnunet.org/monkey/survey/index.php/943594?lang=en
Happy hacking!
Christian Grothoff & Markus Teich
p.s.: We'll be happy to talk with you about Monkey at the Tor developer meeting in Munich; however, Markus's thesis deadline is earlier...