Automatic mining of source code repositories to improve bug finding techniques

Author

Williams, Chadd C. ; Hollingsworth, Jeffrey K.

Author_Institution

Maryland Univ., College Park, MD, USA

Volume

31

Issue

6

fYear

2005

fDate

6/1/2005 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

466

Lastpage

480

Abstract

We describe a method to use the source code change history of a software project to drive and help to refine the search for bugs. Based on the data retrieved from the source code repository, we implement a static source code checker that searches for a commonly fixed bug and uses information automatically mined from the source code repository to refine its results. By applying our tool, we have identified a total of 178 warnings that are likely bugs in the Apache Web server source code and a total of 546 warnings that are likely bugs in Wine, an open-source implementation of the Windows API. We show that our technique is more effective than the same static analysis that does not use historical data from the source code repository.

Keywords

Internet; application program interfaces; configuration management; data mining; file servers; program debugging; program diagnostics; program testing; public domain software; Apache Web server; Windows API; automatic mining; bug finding technique; configuration control; data retrieval; debugging aids; historical data; open-source implementation; software project; source code repository; static analysis; static source code checker; testing tools; version control; Computer bugs; Data mining; Debugging; Detectors; History; Information retrieval; Inspection; Open source software; Programming profession; Web server; Index Terms- Testing tools; configuration control; debugging aids.; version control;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0098-5589

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TSE.2005.63

Filename

1463230