Mary Jean Harrold, Computing Sciences and Systems (CSS) division professor and member of the SPARC Group was awarded a grant from NSF’s highly-competitive Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) Program Her project titled, Automatic Fault Localization Using Statistics and Visualization will be funded for three years for a total of $409,430.

Existing automated debugging techniques have limitations that prevent them from scaling to industrial systems. Harrold's project will investigate fault-localization techniques that can be used in practice through several activities: the research will develop improved techniques that can more quickly guide the user to the faulty regions of the system and exploit programmer knowledge and guidance; the research will design and conduct controlled experiments and case studies to evaluate cost-benefits of new and improved techniques, as well as to understand the factors contributing to those costs-benefits; the research will also assemble an infrastructure of programs, faulty versions, and test suites for future fault-localization approaches.

For more information regarding this award, as well as the other 12 NSF Awards Mary Jean Harrold has received throughout her career, click here.