Bug-Assist: assisting fault localization in ANSI-C programs

Authors:
Manu Jose;Rupak Majumdar
Affiliations:
University of California, Department of Computer Science, Los Angeles;University of California, Department of Computer Science, Los Angeles and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Venue:
CAV'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Computer aided verification
Year:
2011

Citing 8
Cited 4

Symbolic model checking using SAT procedures instead of BDDs

Proceedings of the 36th annual ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference
Isolating cause-effect chains from computer programs

Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Foundations of software engineering
From symptom to cause: localizing errors in counterexample traces

POPL '03 Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Supporting Controlled Experimentation with Testing Techniques: An Infrastructure and its Potential Impact

Empirical Software Engineering
Empirical evaluation of the tarantula automatic fault-localization technique

Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering
Error explanation with distance metrics

International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT)
Algorithms for maximum satisfiability using unsatisfiable cores

Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe
Cause clue clauses: error localization using maximum satisfiability

Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation

Joogie: infeasible code detection for java

CAV'12 Proceedings of the 24th international conference on Computer Aided Verification
Explaining inconsistent code

Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
Growing solver-aided languages with rosette

Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software
Iterative and core-guided MaxSAT solving: A survey and assessment

Constraints

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Several verification tools exist for checking safety properties of programs and reporting errors. However, a large part of the program development cycle is spend in analyzing the error trace to isolate locations in the code that are potential causes of the bug. Currently, this is usually performed manually, by stepping through the error trace in a debugger. We describe Bug-Assist, a tool that assists programmers localize error causes to a few lines of code. Bug-Assist takes as input an ANSIC program annotated with assertions, performs bounded model checking to find potential assertion violations, and for each error trace returned by the model checker, returns a set of lines of code which can be changed to eliminate the error trace. Bug-Assist formulates error localization as a MAX-SAT problem and uses scalable MAX-SAT solvers. In experiments on a set of C benchmarks, Bug-Assist was able to reduce error traces to only a few lines of code. Bug-Assist is available as an Eclipse plug-in, enabling its easy deployment in the code development phase.