ISSTA

Statistical debugging uses dynamic instrumentation and machine learning to identify predicates on program state that are strongly predictive of program failure. Prior approaches have only considered simple, atomic predicates such as the directions of ...

The presence of multiple faults in a program can inhibit the ability of fault-localization techniques to locate the faults. This problem occurs for two reasons: when a program fails, the number of faults is, in general, unknown; and certain faults may ...

As concurrent and distributive applications are becoming more common and debugging such applications is very difficult, practical tools for automatic debugging of concurrent applications are in demand. In previous work, we applied automatic debugging to ...

We propose an interface specification language based on grammars for modular software model checking. In our interface specification language, component interfaces are specified as context free grammars. An interface grammar for a component specifies ...

State-space exploration is the essence of model checking and an increasingly popular approach for automating test generation. A key issue in exploration of object-oriented programs is handling the program state, in particular the heap. Previous research ...

One of the major challenges in the development of large component-based software systems is the system assembly problem: from a sea of available components, which should be selected and how should they be connected, integrated, and assembled so that the ...

Evolutionary testing has been widely studied as a technique for automating the process of test case generation. However, to date, there has been no theoretical examination of when and why it works. Furthermore, the empirical evidence for the ...

Progress in testing requires that we evaluate the effectiveness of testing strategies on the basis of hard experimental evidence, not just intuition or a priori arguments. Random testing, the use of randomly generated test data, is an example of a ...

When releasing a new consumer product, the anticipated profits can be slashed by being late to market or having poor quality. Companies are keen to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing, to reduce their lead time and to be confident of the ...

This paper describes an analysis approach based on a of static and dynamic techniques to ?nd run-time errors in Java code. It uses symbolic execution to ?nd constraints under which an error (e.g. a null pointer dereference, array out of bounds access, ...

The effectiveness of software quality techniques varies. Many uncertain or unpredictable factors influence effectiveness, including human factors, the types of defects in the program, and luck. Compared to using a single quality technique, a diversified ...

This paper defines a new analysis paradigm, blended program analysis, that enables practical, effective analysis of large framework-based Java applications for performance understanding. Blended analysis combines a dynamic representation of the program ...

Combinatorial interaction testing (CIT) is a method to sample configurations of a software system systematically for testing. Many algorithms have been developed that create CIT samples, however few have considered the practical concerns that arise when ...

Previous work has treated test case selection as a single objective optimisation problem. This paper introduces the concept of Pareto efficiency to test case selection. The Pareto efficient approach takes multiple objectives such as code coverage, past ...

We describe an algorithm for automatic test input generation for database applications. Given a program in an imperative language that interacts with a database through API calls, our algorithm generates both input data for the program as well as ...

Neglected conditions are an important but difficult-to-find class of software defects. This paper presents a novel approach to revealing neglected conditions that integrates static program analysis and advanced data mining techniques to discover ...

We present a novel approach to client-side mining of temporal API specifications based on static analysis. Specifically, we present an interprocedural analysis over a combined domain that abstracts both aliasing and event sequences for individual ...

Capturing dynamic control dependence is critical for many dynamic program analysis such as dynamic slicing, dynamic information flow, and data lineage computation. Existing algorithms are mostly a simple runtime translation of the static definition, ...

Dynamic taint analysis is gaining momentum. Techniques based on dynamic tainting have been successfully used in the context of application security, and now their use is also being explored in different areas, such as program understanding, software ...

Debugging long running multithreaded programs is a very challenging problem when using tracing-based analyses. Since such programs are non-deterministic, reproducing the bug is non-trivial and generating and inspecting traces for long running programs ...

This research investigates ways of predicting which files would be most likely to contain large numbers of faults in the next release of a large industrial software system. Previous work involved making predictions using several different models ranging ...

Dynamic slicing is a widely used technique for program analysis, debugging, and comprehension. However, the reported slice is often too large to be inspected by the programmer. In this work, we address this deficiency by hierarchically applying dynamic ...

In modern software development, regression tests are used to confirm the fundamental functionalities of an edited program and to assure the code quality. Difficulties occur when testing reveals unexpected behaviors, which indicate potential defects ...