Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why?

  • Authors:
  • Andreas Zeller

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. Passau, Passau, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ESEC/FSE-7 Proceedings of the 7th European software engineering conference held jointly with the 7th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Imagine some program and a number of changes. If none of these changes is applied (“yesterday”), the program works. If all changes are applied (“today”), the program does not work. Which change is responsible for the failure? We present an efficient algorithm that determines the minimal set of failure-inducing changes. Our delta debugging prototype tracked down a single failure-inducing change from 178,000 changed GDB lines within a few hours.