Isolating Failure Causes through Test Case Generation
- ISSTA 2012
by
Jeremias Rößler, Gordon Fraser, Andreas Zeller, Alessandro Orso
ISSTA '12: Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, July 2012.
Abstract
Manual debugging is driven by experiments---test runs that narrow down failure causes by systematically confirming or excluding individual factors. The BUGEX approach leverages test case generation to systematically isolate such causes from a single failing test run-causes such as properties of execution states or branches taken that correlate with the failure. Identifying these causes allows for deriving conclusions as: "The failure occurs whenever the daylight savings time starts at midnight local time." In our evaluation, a prototype of BUGEX precisely pinpointed important failure explaining facts for six out of seven real-life bugs.
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{roessler-issta-2012,
title = "Isolating Failure Causes through Test Case Generation",
author = "Jeremias Rößler and Gordon Fraser and Andreas Zeller and Alessandro Orso",
year = "2012",
month = jul,
booktitle = "ISSTA '12: Proceedings of the 2012 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis",
location = "Minneapolis, MN, USA",
}