Title
Automated Support for Reproducing and Debugging Field Failures
Abstract
As confirmed by a recent survey conducted among developers of the Apache, Eclipse, and Mozilla projects, two extremely challenging tasks during maintenance are reproducing and debugging field failures—failures that occur on user machines after release. To help developers with these tasks, in this article we present an overall approach that comprises two different techniques: BugRedux and F3. BugRedux is a general technique for reproducing field failures that collects dynamic data about failing executions in the field and uses this data to synthesize executions that mimic the observed field failures. F3 leverages the executions generated by BugRedux to perform automated debugging using a set of suitably optimized fault-localization techniques. To assess the usefulness of our approach, we performed an empirical evaluation of the approach on a set of real-world programs and field failures. The results of our evaluation are promising in that, for all the failures considered, our approach was able to (1) synthesize failing executions that mimicked the observed field failures, (2) synthesize passing executions similar to the failing ones, and (3) use the synthesized executions to successfully perform fault localization with accurate results.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2774218
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Keywords
Field
DocType
Algorithms,Experimentation,Verification,Debugging,fault localization,field failures
Programming language,Computer science,Dynamic data,Eclipse,Debugging
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
24
4
1049-331X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.37
51
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wei Jin12118.26
Alessandro Orso23550172.85