Table of Contents

Debugging and rootcausing issues

Start from the MRE

Minimum Reproducible Example. Often, if you can get one half of your problem is solved. This is why is so important to provide one when creating issues. The smaller the state graph needed to reproduce the issue, the better.

Write a regression test

Write a test, and make sure it fails. After your fix is applied, the test should start passing again. When writing the regression test, make sure to think what could happen if you have multiple workers involved. Do you need to test that as well?

Generate the state graph

See generating state graphs page. State graphs can help visualize what’s going on.

Run your spec with assertion turned on.

TLC has a -ea option that will enable some assertions in the code. It might be able to help catching some edge case hit by your code.

Run with debugging logs

I don’t find these particular helpful, but it’s worth trying. Run tlc with -debug on and you will get additional debug logs in output.

Attaching a debugger

To the final jar:

java -agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=*:5005 -jar ./dist/tla2tools.jar /tmp/genereto/Github710a.tla 

Eliminate randomness

To enanche reproducibility. Use -fp and -seed.

java -jar ./dist/tla2tools.jar -lncheck final -fpmem 0.65 -fp 120 -seed -8286054000752913025  -workers 10 /tmp/genereto/Github710a.tla 

More options

Check Testing page for more info on the options available when running tests.