Abstract:Static trace simplification technique is a method to improve the efficiency of debugging through reducing the number of thread contexts in a buggy execution trace without changing the dependency information. However, the application of static trace simplification technique to simply a buggy trace still faces a strong challenge in that the distribution of reduced thread contexts is usually non-uniform, and therefore a random trace simplification technique is difficult to achieve. In this paper, a convergence-oriented static trace simplification approach is proposed to address this challenge. The essential idea of this approach is to build a static trace simplification model, and then repeatedly adopt a convergence-oriented merging algorithm to search the mergeable previous and succeeding intervals in the same thread. Experimental results show that this new approach can simply the traces with high quality. It can help programers find the thread interleaves that cause the faults.