Abstract
Manually locating and removing bugs in faulty code is often tedious and error-prone. Despite much progress in automated debugging, developing effective debugging techniques remains a challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach that uses a well-known program synthesis technique to automate debugging. As inputs, our approach takes a program and a test suite (with some passing and some failing tests), similar to various other recent techniques. Our key insight is to reduce the problem of finding a fix to the problem of program sketching. We translate the faulty program into a sketch of the correct program, and use off-the-shelf sketching technology to create a program that is correct with respect to the given test cases. The experimental evaluation using a suite of small, yet complex programs shows that our prototype embodiment of our approach is more effective than previous state-of-the-art.
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Ackowlegement
We thank Armando Solar-Lezama and Rishabh Singh for helpful comments and encouragement. This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. CCF-1319688).
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Hua, J., Khurshid, S. (2016). A Sketching-Based Approach for Debugging Using Test Cases. In: Artho, C., Legay, A., Peled, D. (eds) Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis. ATVA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9938. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46520-3_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46520-3_29
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