Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC '08),
IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, pp. 128-135 (2008)

Debugging through Evaluation Sequences: A Controlled Experimental Study 1

Zhenyu Zhang 2 , Bo Jiang 2 , W.K. Chan 3 , and T.H. Tse 4

[paper from IEEE Xplore | paper from IEEE digital library | technical report TR-2008-07]

 ABSTRACT

Predicate-based statistical fault-localization techniques locate fault-relevant predicates in a program by contrasting the statistics of the values of individual predicates between successful and failure-causing runs. While short-circuit evaluations are common in program execution, treating predicates as atomic units ignores this fact, masking out various types of important statistics. On the contrary, are such statistics useful for debugging? In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of the use of short-circuit evaluation information on fault localization. The results show that, by doing so, it significantly improves predicate-based statistical fault-localization techniques.

Keywords: Evaluation sequence, fault localization

1. This project is supported in part by the General Research Fund of the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (project nos. 111107 and 716507).
2. Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
3. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Hong Kong.
4. (Corresponding author.)
Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong.
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