An empirical study of reported bugs in server software with implications for automated bug diagnosis

Sahoo, Sanjaya Kumar; Criswell, John; Adve, Vikram

doi:10.1145/1806799.1806870

Cited by 49 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The role of software users and essential information in bug-fixing has been emphasized in several studies [1,2,25,31]. Bettenburg et al [1] found that there is usually a strong mismatch in bug reports between what developers need to reproduce and fix a bug and what is provided by users.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Jin

Qu²,

Cohen

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Many industrial systems are highly-configurable, complicating the testing and debugging process. While researchers have developed techniques to statically extract, quantify and manipulate the valid system configurations, we conjecture that many of these techniques will fail in practice. In this paper we analyze a highly-configurable industrial application and two open source applications in order to quantify the true challenges that configurability creates for software testing and debugging. We find that (1) all three applications consist of multiple programming languages, hence static analyses need to cross programming language barriers to work, (2) there are many access points and methods to modify configurations, implying that practitioners need configuration traceability and should gather and merge metadata from more than one source and (3) the configuration state of an application on failure cannot be reliably determined by reading persistent data; a runtime memory dump or other heuristics must be used for accurate debugging. We conclude with a roadmap and lessons learned to help practitioners better handle configurability now, and that may lead to new configuration-aware testing and debugging techniques in the future.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Jin

Qu²,

Cohen

et al. 2014

Companion Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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show abstract

“…The inputs from the bug reports we used in experiments were small but not necessarily minimal. An earlier empirical study [37] of over 260 randomly selected bugs in six different server applications (including some stateful servers) found that most bugs could be reproduced with 3 or fewer inputs. If the inputs are very large, tools like ddmin [45], delta debugging [12,44], and C-Reduce [36] do a good job of minimizing the inputs for many classes of applications.…”

Section: Good and Bad Input Constructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using likely invariants for automated software fault localization

Sahoo

Criswell

Geigle

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems

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We propose an automatic diagnosis technique for isolating the root cause(s) of software failures. We use likely program invariants, automatically generated using correct inputs that are close to the fault-triggering input, to select a set of candidate program locations which are possible root causes. We then trim the set of candidate root causes using software-implemented dynamic backwards slicing, plus two new filtering heuristics: dependence filtering, and filtering via multiple failing inputs that are also close to the failing input. Experimental results on reported software bugs of three large open-source servers show that we are able to narrow down the number of candidate bug locations to between 5 and 17 program expressions, even in programs that are hundreds of thousands of lines long.

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“…Fonseca et al [8] expressed that many such studies centered around the causes (i.e., error propagation chains) of the studied concurrency bugs, and they [8] studied the effects of concurrency bugs. Sahoo et al [22] found that many concurrency bugs reported in the opensource bug repositories of the selected server applications could not be reproduced deterministically, and these reproducible bugs only constituted a small portion of all the bug records they have examined.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Study on the Efficiency Aspect of Data Race Detection: A Compiler Optimization Level Perspective

Jia

Chan

2013

2013 13th International Conference on Quality Software

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Dynamically detecting data races in multithreaded programs incurs significant slowdown and memory overheads. Many existing techniques have been put forward to improve the performance slowdown through different dimensions such as sampling, detection precision, and data structures to track the happened-before relations among events in execution traces. Compiling the program source code with different compiler optimization options, such as reducing the object code size as the selected optimization objective, may produce different versions of the object code. Does optimizing the object code with a standard optimization option help improve the performance of the precise online race detection? To study this question and a family of related questions, this paper reports a pilot study based on four benchmarks from the PARSEC 3.0 suite compiled with six GCC compiler optimization options. We observe from the empirical data that in terms of performance slowdown, the standard optimization options behave comparably to the optimization options for speed and code size, but behave quite different from the baseline option. Moreover, in terms of memory cost, the standard optimization options incur similar memory costs as the baseline option and the option for speed, and consume less memory than the option for code size.

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An empirical study of reported bugs in server software with implications for automated bug diagnosis

Cited by 49 publications

References 29 publications

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Configurations everywhere: implications for testing and debugging in practice

Using likely invariants for automated software fault localization

A Study on the Efficiency Aspect of Data Race Detection: A Compiler Optimization Level Perspective

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