Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

7-2009

Abstract

Bug localization has attracted a lot of attention recently. Most existing methods focus on pinpointing a single statement or function call which is very likely to contain bugs. Although such methods could be very accurate, it is usually very hard for developers to understand the context of the bug, given each bug location in isolation. In this study, we propose to model software executions with graphs at two levels of granularity: methods and basic blocks. An individual node represents a method or basic block and an edge represents a method call, method return or transition (at the method or basic block granularity). Given a set of graphs of correct and faulty executions, we propose to extract the most discriminative subgraphs which contrast the program flow of correct and faulty executions. The extracted subgraphs not only pinpoint the bug, but also provide an informative context for understanding and fixing the bug. Different from traditional graph mining which mines a very large set of frequent subgraphs, we formulate subgraph mining as an optimization problem and directly generate the most discriminative subgraph with a recently proposed graph mining algorithm LEAP. We further extend it to generate a ranked list of top-k discriminative subgraphs representing distinct locations which may contain bugs. Experimental results and case studies show that our proposed method is both effective and efficient to mine discriminative subgraphs for bug localization and context identification.

Keywords

bug signature, discriminative subgraph mining

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software Systems

Publication

ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA)

First Page

141

Last Page

152

ISBN

9781605583389

Identifier

10.1145/1572272.1572290

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1572272.1572290

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