Article

SOBER: statistical model-based bug localization

Authors:

Samuel P. MidkiffAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

Pages 286 - 295

https://doi.org/10.1145/1081706.1081753

Published: 01 September 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Automated localization of software bugs is one of the essential issues in debugging aids. Previous studies indicated that the evaluation history of program predicates may disclose important clues about underlying bugs. In this paper, we propose a new statistical model-based approach, called SOBER, which localizes software bugs without any prior knowledge of program semantics. Unlike existing statistical debugging approaches that select predicates correlated with program failures, SOBER models evaluation patterns of predicates in both correct and incorrect runs respectively and regards a predicate as bug-relevant if its evaluation pattern in incorrect runs differs significantly from that in correct ones. SOBER features a principled quantification of the pattern difference that measures the bug-relevance of program predicates.We systematically evaluated our approach under the same setting as previous studies. The result demonstrated the power of our approach in bug localization: SOBER can help programmers locate 68 out of 130 bugs in the Siemens suite when programmers are expected to examine no more than 10% of the code, whereas the best previously reported is 52 out of 130. Moreover, with the assistance of SOBER, we found two bugs in bc 1.06 (an arbitrary precision calculator on UNIX/Linux), one of which has never been reported before.

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Cited By

Jiang JWang YChen JLv DLiu M(2023)Variable-Based Fault Localization via Enhanced Decision TreeACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/3624741Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3624741
Hassan FMeng NWang X(2023)UniLoc: Unified Fault Localization of Continuous Integration FailuresACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/359379932:6(1-31)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593799
Zhu ZTong HWang YLi Y(2023)BL-GAN: Semi-Supervised Bug Localization via Generative Adversarial NetworkIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2022.322532935:11(11112-11125)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2022.3225329
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

SOBER: statistical model-based bug localization
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Process validation
        Traceability
      2. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering

September 2005

402 pages

ISBN:1595930140

DOI:10.1145/1081706

General Chair:
Michel Wermelinger
The Open University, UK
,
Program Chair:
Harald C. Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 30, Issue 5
September 2005
462 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/1095430
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 September 2005

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ESEC/FSE05

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ESEC/FSE05: Joint 10th European Software Engineering Conference 2005

September 5 - 9, 2005

Lisbon, Portugal

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Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Citations

Cited By

Jiang JWang YChen JLv DLiu M(2023)Variable-Based Fault Localization via Enhanced Decision TreeACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/3624741Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1145/3624741
Hassan FMeng NWang X(2023)UniLoc: Unified Fault Localization of Continuous Integration FailuresACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/359379932:6(1-31)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593799
Zhu ZTong HWang YLi Y(2023)BL-GAN: Semi-Supervised Bug Localization via Generative Adversarial NetworkIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2022.322532935:11(11112-11125)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2022.3225329
Yan JWang MLiu YYan JZhang L(2023)Locating Framework-specific Crashing Faults with Compact and Explainable Candidate Set2023 IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00026(172-183)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00026
Wong WLee HGao RNaish L(2023)Spectrum‐Based Techniques for Software Fault LocalizationHandbook of Software Fault Localization10.1002/9781119880929.ch4(201-270)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119880929.ch4
Wang JJiang YSu TLi SXu CLu JSu ZRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)Detecting non-crashing functional bugs in Android apps via deep-state differential analysisProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549170(434-446)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3540250.3549170
Jarman DBerry JSmith RThung FLo D(2022)Legion: Massively Composing Rankers for Improved Bug Localization at AdobeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.307521548:8(3010-3024)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3075215
Yoshioka HHigo YKusumoto S(2022)Improving Weighted-SBFL by Blocking Spectrum2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00036(253-263)Online publication date: Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM55253.2022.00036
Verma SRoy S(2022)Debug-localize-repair: a symbiotic construction for heap manipulationsFormal Methods in System Design10.1007/s10703-021-00387-z58:3(399-439)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-021-00387-z
Mo RCai YKazman RXiao LFeng Q(2021)Architecture Anti-Patterns: Automatically Detectable Violations of Design PrinciplesIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.291085647:5(1008-1028)Online publication date: 1-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2019.2910856
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