Locating Causes of Program Failures
- ICSE 2005
by
Holger Cleve, Andreas Zeller
ICSE '05: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, Pages 342-351, ACM Press, New York, NY, USA, May 2005.
ISBN: 1595939632
Digital Library via DOI: 10.1145/1062455.1062522 - Local copy: Download as PDF file.
See also
More information is available at http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/dd/.
Abstract
Which is the defect that causes a software failure? By comparing the program states of a failing and a passing run, we can identify the state differences that cause the failure. However, these state differences can occur all over the program run. Therefore, we focus in space on those variables and values that are relevant for the failure, and in time on those moments where cause transitions occur-moments where new relevant variables begin being failure causes: "Initially, variable argc was 3; therefore, at shell_sort(), variable a[2] was 0, and therefore, the program failed." In our evaluation, cause transitions locate the failure-inducing defect twice as well as the best methods known so far.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{cleve-icse-2005,
title = "Locating Causes of Program Failures",
author = "Holger Cleve and Andreas Zeller",
year = "2005",
month = may,
address = "New York, NY, USA",
booktitle = "ICSE '05: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering",
location = "St. Louis, MO, USA",
pages = "342--351",
publisher = "ACM Press",
ISBN = "1595939632",
doi = "10.1145/1062455.1062522",
}