Statistical Debugging

This is cute — download a special version of open-source software like Evolution, Gaim, The Gimp, Nautilus, or Rhythmbox from The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project and they’ll randomly sample usage paterns to try to automatically detect bugs that make software crash. Unlike the usual “this application has unexpectedly quit, shall I email a crash log to the developer” kind of thing, this one collects sparse data from both crashes and normal use, enabling an automated classifier to tease out what the differences were.