Using Daikon to Prioritize and Group Unit Bugs

Abstract

Unit testing and verification constitute an important step in the validation life cycle of large and complex multi-component software code bases. Many unit validation methods often suffer from the problem of false failure alarms, when they analyse a component in isolation and look for errors. It often turns out that some of the reported unit failures are infeasible, i.e. the valuations of the component input parameters that trigger the failure, though feasible on the unit module in isolation, cannot occur in practice considering the integrated code, in which the unit-under-test is instantiated. In this paper, we consider this problem in the context of a multi-function software code base, with a set of unit level failures reported on a specific function. We present here an automated two-stage failure classification and prioritization strategy that can filter out false alarms and classify them accordingly. Early experiments show interesting results.