Generating Fixes from Object Behavior Anomalies

Author

Dallmeier, Valentin ; Zeller, Andreas ; Meyer, Bertrand

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Saarland Univ., Saarbrucken, Germany

fYear

2009

fDate

16-20 Nov. 2009

Firstpage

550

Lastpage

554

Abstract

Advances in recent years have made it possible in some cases to locate a bug (the source of a failure) automatically. But debugging is also about correcting bugs. Can tools do this automatically? The results reported in this paper, from the new PACHIKA tool, suggest that such a goal may be reachable. PACHIKA leverages differences in program behavior to generate program fixes directly. It automatically summarizes executions to object behavior models, determines differences between passing and failing runs, generates possible fixes, and assesses them via the regression test suite. Evaluated on the ASPECTJ bug history, PACHIKA generates a valid fix for 3 out of 18 crashing bugs; each fix pinpoints the bug location and passes the ASPECTJ test suite.

Keywords

program debugging; program testing; software tools; ASPECTJ bug; ASPECTJ test suite; PACHIKA tool; bugs correction; debugging; object behavior anomalies; program execution; program fixes generation; regression test suite; Automatic testing; Computer bugs; Computer crashes; Computer science; Debugging; History; Java; Programming profession; Software engineering; Vehicle crash testing; debugging; fixing; object usage patterns;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Automated Software Engineering, 2009. ASE '09. 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on

Conference_Location

Auckland

ISSN

1938-4300

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-5259-0

Electronic_ISBN

1938-4300

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ASE.2009.15

Filename

5431737