Hello, Inria Lille is recruiting one phd student and two interns to work on object-centric debugging within the OCRE project (ANR). DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT Debugging is difficult and costly. Object-centric debugging is a young technique arguing that focusing the scope of debugging on specific objects considerably eases the tracking and the understanding of hard bugs in Object-Oriented Programs (OOP). But it lacks fundamental bricks to be applicable in practice. Therefore, it has never been empirically evaluated. The objectives of the OCRE project are to study the fundamental and practical limits that hinder the implementation, the evaluation, and the adoption of object-centric debugging. We propose to build the first generation of object-centric debuggers, in order to identify and evaluate its real benefits to OOP debugging. We argue that these debuggers have the potential to drastically lower the cost (time and effort) of tracking and understanding hard bugs in OOP. PHD TOPIC The goal of this PhD is to understand and to achieve the full potential of object-centric debugging by: - identifying the precise scenarios for object-centric debugging, - studying means to obtain objects to debug, - studying the implementation requirements for object-centric debuggers and to implement prototypes, - evaluate empirically object-centric debugging using these prototypes. The full detailed offer is available here: https://jobs.inria.fr/public/classic/fr/offres/2021-04101 INTERNSHIPS These two internships aim at helping the design and the implementation of an object-centric debugger, by unveiling knowledge without which object-centric debuggers cannot be built and evaluated, or cannot be used in practice. Internship 1 - Identifying and acquiring objects to debug The objective of this internship is to study the practical problems of acquiring objects to debug. The intern will characterize the scenarios in which developers need to identify objects to debug and explore these scenarios by implementing prototypes. Internship 2 - Evaluating object-centric debugging scenarios The objective of this internship is to identify and to evaluate the debugging scenarios that are the most likely to benefit from object-centric debugging. The intern will interrogate real developers about object-centric debugging scenarios, then implement prototypes and evaluate them empirically with developers to validate these scenarios. ADMINISTRATIVE DETAILS Location: Lille, France Phd: - starting date: preferably october 2022, but it can start before. - duration: 3 years (fully funded) - the candidate must hold a Master or an equivalent degree Internships: - starting date: anytime - duration: 4-6 months - the candidate must be studying for a Master degree or equivalent (1st or 2nd year, equivalent to M1 or M2 in France)