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A Search-Based Framework for Failure Reproduction

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Search Based Software Engineering (SSBSE 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7515))

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Abstract

The task of debugging software failures is generally time consuming and involves substantial manual effort. A crucial part of this task lies in the reproduction of the reported failure at the developer’s site. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that aims to address the problem of failure reproduction by employing an adaptive search-based approach in combination with a limited amount of instrumentation. In particular, we formulate the problem of reproducing failures as a search problem: reproducing a software failure can be viewed as the search for a set of inputs that lead its execution to the failing path. The search is guided by information obtained through instrumentation. Preliminary experiments on small-size programs show promising results in which the proposed approach outperforms random search.

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Kifetew, F.M. (2012). A Search-Based Framework for Failure Reproduction. In: Fraser, G., Teixeira de Souza, J. (eds) Search Based Software Engineering. SSBSE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7515. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33119-0_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33119-0_22

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33118-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33119-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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