Free Access to UDB Time Travel Debugger For Lecturers And Students
Cambridge, August 19, 2021 – Undo has launched an Educational License Program for university lecturers teaching C/C++ programming and debugging.
The program makes it possible for Computer Science lecturers to teach their students about Time Travel Debugging – the latest innovative debugging technology used by professional software engineers within leading technology organizations including Siemens, Juniper Networks, and SAP.
Studies show that professional software developers spend over 25% of their time debugging. Frighteningly, some developers report spending 100% of their time on debugging! Yet much formal computer science education addresses debugging superficially, or not at all.
In the world of industry, software has become so complex that developers regularly waste days, if not weeks, on trying to reproduce defects so they can root-cause the issue and fix the problem. According to a recent analyst’s report, 91% of software developers admit to having defects which remain unresolved because they cannot reproduce the issue.
Traditional methods of debugging have remained fundamentally unchanged since circa 1972 and these are no longer sufficient for debugging complex systems. The most inefficient part of traditional debugging stems from working forward from the point of the crash or error. This way of working is slow and results in the need to repeatedly restart the program with different breakpoint locations.
But what if you could time travel through the execution history of a failed process from the symptom all the way to the root cause?
That’s where Time Travel Debugging comes in: this innovative capability allows developers to step freely forward and backward through program execution, drastically reducing the time invested in troubleshooting.
This technical paper outlines what Time Travel Debugging is, and how it compares with GDB and traditional techniques such as logging or printf.
In order to allow students to learn how to work with Time Travel Debugging, Undo is making UDB (its time travel debugger for C/C++) available for free to lecturers and students. Currently, this new educational license program is available in the US, the UK, and India. (It will expand to cover additional countries as soon as possible.)
Lecturers and professors interested in trialling the tech before incorporating it into their curriculum should get in touch with Undo directly, to get their free license. Students can download the software directly from this landing page.
Note: In September, Undo will be launching a Time Travel Debugger for Java developers. So, if you teach Java programming, get in touch with Undo now, to register your interest!
About Undo
Undo is the leading Software Failure Replay platform provider. Its technology is used by software engineering teams building complex software solutions to resolve defects faster, improve software quality, and deliver a better customer experience.