Abstract Relative Debugging allows a user to compare the internal state of two programs as they run, making it possible to test whether two programs perform the same function given the same input. When implemented with a command line user interface, a relative debugger looks like traditional debugging tools with the addition of commands that describe which structures should be equivalent in the two programs. In this paper, we discuss relative debugging within an integrated development environment, and show that there are significant advantages over a command line form. We describe a pluggable, modular, architecture that works with a variety of different products, including Microsoft's Visual Studio, SUN's NetBeans, and IBM's Eclipse. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The creation of a new program version based on an existing version is known as software evolution. In 1994, Abramson and Sosic proposed relative debugging to assist users to locate errors in programs developed with software evolutionary techniques. Relative debugging is a paradigm described by D. Abramson et al. (1996) that enables programmers to locate errors by comparing the developed (evolved) program with the original (existing) program as they are concurrently executed. The aim of the proposed research is to further enhance the currently defined paradigm by (partially or completely) automating the process of relatively debugging. We investigate the possibility of automatically identifying the data structures and program points, normally performed by the user, where values should be equivalent during program execution. Minimizing the user's involvement will reduce the cost of enhancing, maintaining and porting software, and has the potential to provide significant productivity gains on current practices in software development.