A Formalization of Heisenbugs and Their Causes

Abstract

The already challenging task of identifying the cause of a bug becomes even more cumbersome if those bugs disappear or change their behavior under observation. Such bugs occur in a range of contexts including elusive concurrency bugs as well as unintended system alterations during debugging and—as a pun on the name of Werner Heisenberg—are often referred to as Heisenbugs. Heisenbugs can be caused by various sources of nondeterminism on different system levels, many of which developers and testers might not even be aware of. This paper provides formal foundations for rigorously reasoning about causes of Heisenbugs. It provides a formal definition of Heisenbugs in terms of a hyperproperty and introduces a framework for determining the causality of Heisenbugs in presence of multiple candidate causes based on said hyperproperty. We analyze the properties of causes and the implications on practical causal analyses.