Detecting missing method calls as violations of the majority rule

Authors:
Martin Monperrus;Mira Mezini
Affiliations:
Technische Universität Darmstadt;Technische Universität Darmstadt
Venue:
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Year:
2013

Citing 29
Cited 0

Dynamically Discovering Likely Program Invariants to Support Program Evolution

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on 1999 international conference on software engineering
Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code

SOSP '01 Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Mining specifications

POPL '02 Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Tracking down software bugs using automatic anomaly detection

Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering
Soot - a Java bytecode optimization framework

CASCON '99 Proceedings of the 1999 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research
The complexity of mining maximal frequent itemsets and maximal frequent patterns

Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
Finding and preventing run-time error handling mistakes

OOPSLA '04 Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
Finding bugs is easy

ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Automatic Mining of Source Code Repositories to Improve Bug Finding Techniques

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
DynaMine: finding common error patterns by mining software revision histories

Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
PR-Miner: automatically extracting implicit programming rules and detecting violations in large software code

Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
Perracotta: mining temporal API rules from imperfect traces

Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
Understanding the shape of Java software

Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
Representing concerns in source code

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Finding what's not there: a new approach to revealing neglected conditions in software

Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Software testing and analysis
Detecting object usage anomalies

Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
Which warnings should I fix first?

Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
DSD-Crasher: A hybrid analysis tool for bug finding

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Scalable detection of semantic clones

Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering
Accurate and Efficient Structural Characteristic Feature Extraction for Clone Detection

FASE '09 Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering: Held as Part of the Joint European Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2009
Discovering and representing systematic code changes

ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Graph-based mining of multiple object usage patterns

Proceedings of the the 7th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
A few billion lines of code later: using static analysis to find bugs in the real world

Communications of the ACM
An empirical study on the maintenance of source code clones

Empirical Software Engineering
Recurring bug fixes in object-oriented programs

Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1
Detecting missing method calls in object-oriented software

ECOOP'10 Proceedings of the 24th European conference on Object-oriented programming
Lightweight defect localization for java

ECOOP'05 Proceedings of the 19th European conference on Object-Oriented Programming
Topology analysis of software dependencies

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

When using object-oriented frameworks it is easy to overlook certain important method calls that are required at particular places in code. In this article, we provide a comprehensive set of empirical facts on this problem, starting from traces of missing method calls in a bug repository. We propose a new system that searches for missing method calls in software based on the other method calls that are observable. Our key insight is that the voting theory concept of majority rule holds for method calls: a call is likely to be missing if there is a majority of similar pieces of code where this call is present. The evaluation shows that the system predictions go further missing method calls and often reveal different kinds of code smells (e.g., violations of API best practices).