Impendulo: debugging the programmer

Abstract

We describe the Impendulo tool for fine-grained analyses of programmer behavior. The initial design goal was to create a system to answer the following simple question: "What kind of mistakes do programmers make and how often do they make these mistakes?" However it quickly became apparent that the tool can be used to also analyze other fundamental software engineering questions, such as, how good are static analysis tools at finding real errors?, what is the fault finding capability of automated test generation tools?, what is the influence of a bad specification?, etc. We briefly describe the tool and some of the insights gained from using it.