Chengnian Sun
ABSTRACT
A bug signature is a set of program elements highlighting the cause or effect of a bug, and provides contextual information for debugging. In order to mine a signature for a buggy program, two sets of execution profiles of the program, one capturing the correct execution and the other capturing the faulty, are examined to identify the program elements contrasting faulty from correct. Signatures solely consisting of control flow transitions have been investigated via discriminative sequence and graph mining algorithms. These signatures might be handicapped in cases where the effect of a bug is not manifested by any deviation in control flow transitions. In this paper, we introduce the notion of predicated bug signature\/ that aims to enhance the predictive power of bug signatures by utilizing both data predicates and control-flow information. We introduce a novel ``discriminative itemset generator'' mining technique to generate succinct\/ signatures which do not contain redundant or irrelevant program elements. Our case studies demonstrate that predicated signatures can hint at more scenarios of bugs where traditional control-flow signatures fail.
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Index Terms
- Mining succinct predicated bug signatures
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