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ChangeLocator: locate crash-inducing changes based on crash reports

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Abstract

Software crashes are severe manifestations of software bugs. Debugging crashing bugs is tedious and time-consuming. Understanding software changes that induce a crashing bug can provide useful contextual information for bug fixing and is highly demanded by developers. Locating the bug inducing changes is also useful for automatic program repair, since it narrows down the root causes and reduces the search space of bug fix location. However, currently there are no systematic studies on locating the software changes to a source code repository that induce a crashing bug reflected by a bucket of crash reports. To tackle this problem, we first conducted an empirical study on characterizing the bug inducing changes for crashing bugs (denoted as crash-inducing changes). We also propose ChangeLocator, a method to automatically locate crash-inducing changes for a given bucket of crash reports. We base our approach on a learning model that uses features originated from our empirical study and train the model using the data from the historical fixed crashes. We evaluated ChangeLocator with six release versions of Netbeans project. The results show that it can locate the crash-inducing changes for 44.7%, 68.5%, and 74.5% of the bugs by examining only top 1, 5 and 10 changes in the recommended list, respectively. It significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approach.

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Notes

  1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=448608

  2. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589191

  3. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=941044

  4. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400291

  5. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=446630

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Acknowledgments

We thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. This research is supported by Hong Kong SAR RGC/GRF grant 16202917, NSFC grant 61272089, and 2016 Microsoft Research Asia Collaborative Research Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

    Rongxin Wu, Ming Wen & Shing-Chi Cheung

  2. School of Electrical Engineering and Computing, The University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia

    Hongyu Zhang

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  1. Rongxin Wu
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  2. Ming Wen
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  4. Hongyu Zhang
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Correspondence to Rongxin Wu.

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Communicated by: Martin Monperrus and Westley Weimer

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Wu, R., Wen, M., Cheung, SC. et al. ChangeLocator: locate crash-inducing changes based on crash reports. Empir Software Eng 23, 2866–2900 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-017-9567-4

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