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Improving Efficiency and Accuracy of Formula-Based Debugging

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Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing (HVC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 10028))

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Abstract

Formula-based debugging techniques are extremely appealing, as they provide a principled way to identify potentially faulty statements together with information that can help fix such statements. These approaches are however computationally expensive, which limits their practical applicability. Moreover, they tend to focus on failing test cases and ignore the information provided by passing tests. To mitigate these issues, we propose on-demand formula computation (OFC) and clause weighting (CW). OFC improves the overall efficiency of formula-based debugging by exploring all and only the parts of a program that are relevant to a failure. CW improves the accuracy of formula-based debugging by leveraging statistical fault-localization information that accounts for passing tests. Although OFC and CW are only a first step towards making formula-based debugging more applicable, our empirical results show that they are effective and improve the state of the art.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by NSF grants CCF1320783 and CCF1161821, and by funding from Google, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology and Google Inc., Mountain View, California, USA

    Wei Jin

  2. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Alessandro Orso

Authors
  1. Wei Jin
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  2. Alessandro Orso
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alessandro Orso .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IAIK, Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Roderick Bloem

  2. IBM Research Labs, Haifa, Israel

    Eli Arbel

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Jin, W., Orso, A. (2016). Improving Efficiency and Accuracy of Formula-Based Debugging. In: Bloem, R., Arbel, E. (eds) Hardware and Software: Verification and Testing. HVC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10028. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49052-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49052-6_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49051-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49052-6

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