SBFR: A search based approach for reproducing failures of programs with grammar based input

Reproducing field failures in-house, a step developers must perform when assigned a bug report, is an arduous task. In most cases, developers must be able to reproduce a reported failure using only a stack trace and/or some informal description of the failure. The problem becomes even harder for the large class of programs whose input is highly structured and strictly specified by a grammar. To address this problem, we present SBFR, a search-based failure-reproduction technique for programs with structured input. SBFR formulates failure reproduction as a search problem. Starting from a reported failure and a limited amount of dynamic information about the failure, SBFR exploits the potential of genetic programming to iteratively find legal inputs that can trigger the failure.