Abstract:

Despite extensive testing in the development phase, residual defects can be a great threat to dependability in the operational phase. This paper studies the utility of low-cost, generic invariants ("screeners") in their capacity of error detectors within a spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) approach aimed to diagnose program defects in the operational phase. The screeners considered are simple bit-mask and range invariants that screen every load/store and function argument/return program point. Their generic nature allows them to be automatically instrumented without any programmer-effort, while training is straightforward given the test cases available in the development phase. Experiments based on the Siemens program set demonstrate diagnostic performance that is similar to the traditional, development-time application of SFL based on the program pass/fail information known before-hand. This diagnostic performance is currently attained at an average 14% screener execution time overhead, but this overhead can be reduced at limited performance penalty.

Published:

"Automatic Software Fault Localization using Generic Program Invariants"
Rui Abreu, Alberto Gonzalez, Peter Zoeteweij, and Arjan J.C. van Gemund
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing (SAC'08) , Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil, March 2008.

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BibTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{1363855,
 author = {Abreu, Rui and Gonz\'{a}lez, Alberto and Zoeteweij, Peter and van Gemund, Arjan J. C.},
 title = {Automatic software fault localization using generic program invariants},
 booktitle = {SAC '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing},
 year = {2008},
 isbn = {978-1-59593-753-7},
 pages = {712--717},
 location = {Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil},
 doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1363686.1363855},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 }