Title
MIMIC: locating and understanding bugs by analyzing mimicked executions
Abstract
Automated debugging techniques aim to help developers locate and understand the cause of a failure, an extremely challenging yet fundamental task. Most state-of-the-art approaches suffer from two problems: they require a large number of passing and failing tests and report possible faulty code with no explanation. To mitigate these issues, we present MIMIC, a novel automated debugging technique that combines and extends our previous input generation and anomaly detection techniques. MIMIC (1) synthesizes multiple passing and failing executions similar to an observed failure and (2) uses these executions to detect anomalies in behavior that may explain the failure. We evaluated MIMIC on six failures of real-world programs with promising results: for five of these failures, MIMIC identified their root causes while producing a limited number of false positives. Most importantly, the anomalies identified by MIMIC provided information that may help developers understand (and ultimately eliminate) such root causes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1145/2642937.2643014
ASE
Keywords
Field
DocType
anomaly detection,debugging,execution synthesis,testing and debugging
Anomaly detection,Data mining,Computer science,Theoretical computer science,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Debugging,False positive paradox
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
11
0.51
25
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniele Zuddas1192.05
Wei Jin22118.26
Fabrizio Pastore332923.60
Leonardo Mariani423324.60
Alessandro Orso53550172.85