This is an archive of the old software engineering chair at Saarland University. It is no longer up-to-date.

Simplifying and Isolating Failure-Inducing Input
by Andreas Zeller, Ralf Hildebrandt

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Pages 183-200, Volume 28, Number 2, February 2002.

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See also

More information is available at http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/dd/.

Abstract

Given some test case, a program fails. Which circumstances of the test case are responsible for the particular failure? The Delta Debugging algorithm generalizes and simplifies some failing test case to a minimal test case that still produces the failure; it also isolates the difference between a passing and a failing test case. In a case study, the Mozilla web browser crashed after 95 user actions. Our prototype implementation automatically simplified the input to 3 relevant user actions. Likewise, it simplified 896 lines of HTML to the single line that caused the failure. The case study required 139 automated test runs, or 35 minutes on a 500 MHz PC.

Keywords

BibTeX Entry

@article{zeller-tse-2002,
    title = "Simplifying and Isolating Failure-Inducing Input",
    author = "Andreas Zeller and Ralf Hildebrandt",
    year = "2002",
    month = feb,
    journal = "IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering",
    number = "2",
    pages = "183--200",
    volume = "28",
}

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