Path-based fault correlations

• Authors: Wei Le;Mary Lou Soffa
• Venue: Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
• Year: 2010

Although a number of automatic tools have been developed to detect faults, much of the diagnosis is still being done manually. To help with the diagnostic tasks, we formally introduce fault correlation, a causal relationship between faults. We statically determine correlations based on the expected dynamic behavior of a fault. If the occurrence of one fault causes another fault to occur, we say they are correlated. With the identification of the correlated faults, we can better understand fault behaviors and the risks of faults. If one fault is uniquely correlated with another, we know fixing the first fault will fix the other. Correlated faults can be grouped, enabling prioritization of diagnoses of the fault groups. In this paper, we develop an interprocedural, path-sensitive, and scalable algorithm to automatically compute correlated faults in a program. In our approach, we first statically detect faults and determine their error states. By propagating the effects of the error state along a path, we detect the correlation of pairs of faults. We automatically construct a correlation graph which shows how correlations occur among multiple faults and along different paths. Guided by a correlation graph, we can reduce the number of faults required for diagnosis to find root causes. We implemented our correlation algorithm and found through experimentation that faults involved in the correlations can be of different types and located in different procedures. Using correlation information, we are able to automate diagnostic tasks that previously had to be done manually.