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International Conference on Tests and Proofs

TAP 2016: Tests and Proofs pp 171–180Cite as

Debugging Meets Testing in Erlang

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9762))

Abstract

We propose a bidirectional collaboration between declarative debugging and testing for detecting errors in the sequential subset of the programming language Erlang. In our proposal, the information obtained from the user during a debugging session is stored in form of unit tests. These test cases can be employed afterwards to check, through testing, if the bug has been actually corrected. Moreover, the debugger employs already existing tests to determine the correctness of some subcomputations, helping the user to locate the error readily. The process, contrarily to usual debugger frameworks is cumulative: if later we find a new bug we have more information from the previous debugging and testing iterations that can contribute to find the error readily.

Research supported by the Comunidad de Madrid project N-Greens Software-CM (S2013/ICE-2731), by the MINECO Spanish projects StrongSoft (TIN2012-39391-C04-04), VIVAC (TIN2012-38137), CAVI-(ROSE/ART) (TIN2013-44742-C4-(1/3)-R), LOBASS (TIN2015-69175-C4-2-R), and TRACES (TIN2015-67522-C3-3-R), and by the European Union project POLCA (STREP FP7-ICT-2013.3.4 610686).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Erlang also supports test cases ?assert(...) with predicates. Our system can handle these test cases when their predicates involve equality or inequality operators, but we will focus only on ?assertEqual and ?assertNotEqual for simplicity in the presentation.

  2. 2.

    The positive test case, if exists, indicates that the initial symptom is wrong indicating also the expected value. This makes the addition of the negative test case redundant.

  3. 3.

    Nodes’ modules are not shown for the sake of clarity.

  4. 4.

    Notice that, as explained in Sect. 2, a negative test case ?assertNotEqual for the root qs(fun leq/2, [7,1]) is not generated as the test suite already contains a positive test for it (see line 21 in Fig. 2).

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewer of a previous work published in the journal Science of Computer Programming for suggesting us this line of work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Babel Research Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Salvador Tamarit

  2. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Adrián Riesco, Enrique Martin-Martin & Rafael Caballero

Authors
  1. Salvador Tamarit
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  2. Adrián Riesco
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  3. Enrique Martin-Martin
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  4. Rafael Caballero
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rafael Caballero .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Bernhard K. Aichernig

  2. Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden

    Carlo A. Furia

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Tamarit, S., Riesco, A., Martin-Martin, E., Caballero, R. (2016). Debugging Meets Testing in Erlang. In: Aichernig, B., Furia, C. (eds) Tests and Proofs. TAP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41135-4_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41135-4_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-41134-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-41135-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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