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Enhancing Contexts for Automated Debugging Techniques

Authors:
Yan Lei
Chengsong Wang
Xiaoguang Mao
Quanyuan Wu

Keywords: automate debugging; program spectra; program slicing; statistical analysis.

Abstract:
Most existing automated debugging techniques just focus on selecting a set of suspicious statements that may cause failures and ranking them in terms of suspiciousness. Therefore, these techniques always ignore the contextual information of how suspicious statements behave and propagate in the program. However, the contextual information is useful for discovering and understanding bugs. Hence, this paper proposes a novel approach to enhance contexts for automated debugging techniques. Based on localization results obtained from automated debugging techniques, our approach utilizes program slicing to classify suspicious statements into different contexts, and assigns different suspiciousness to the contexts and their elements. The experimental study shows that our approach can substantially improve debugging effectiveness.

Pages: 1 to 7

Copyright: Copyright (c) The Government of China, 2012. Used by permission to IARIA.

Publication date: November 18, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-230-1

Location: Lisbon, Portugal

Dates: from November 18, 2012 to November 23, 2012