Producing and Interpreting Debug Texts

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.