Lightweight defect localization for java

  • Authors:

  • Valentin Dallmeier;Christian Lindig;Andreas Zeller

  • Affiliations:

  • Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ECOOP'05 Proceedings of the 19th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A common method to localize defects is to compare the coverage of passing and failing program runs: A method executed only in failing runs, for instance, is likely to point to the defect. However, some failures, occur only after a specific sequence of method calls, such as multiple deallocations of the same resource. Such sequences can be collected from arbitrary Java programs at low cost; comparing object-specific sequences predicts defects better than simply comparing coverage. In a controlled experiment, our technique pinpointed the defective class in 39% of all test runs.