When does my program fail?
- CSTVA 2011
by
Jeremias Rößler, Alessandro Orso, Andreas Zeller
CSTVA '11: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Constraints in Software Testing, Verification, and Analysis, March 2011.
Abstract
Oops! My program fails. Which are the circumstances under which this failure occurs? Answering this question is one of the first steps in debugging and a crucial one, as it helps characterizing, understanding, and classifying the problem. In this paper, we propose a technique to identify failure circumstances automatically. Given a concrete failure, we first compute the path condition leading to the failure and then use a constraint solver to identify, from the constraints in the path condition, the general failure conditions: The program fails whenever the credit card number begins with 6, 5, and a non-zero digit. A preliminary evaluation of the approach on real programs demonstrates its potential usefulness.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{roessler-cstva-2011,
title = "When does my program fail?",
author = "Jeremias Rößler and Alessandro Orso and Andreas Zeller",
year = "2011",
month = mar,
booktitle = "CSTVA '11: Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Constraints in Software Testing, Verification, and
Analysis",
location = "Berlin, Germany",
}