Improving efficiency and accuracy of formula-based debugging

Abstract

Formula-based debugging techniques are extremely appealing, as they provide a principled way to identify potentially faulty statements together with information that can help fix such statements. These approaches are however computationally expensive, which limits their practical applicability. Moreover, they tend to focus on failing test cases and ignore the information provided by passing tests. To mitigate these issues, we propose on-demand formula computation (OFC) and clause weighting (CW). OFC improves the overall efficiency of formula-based debugging by exploring all and only the parts of a program that are relevant to a failure. CW improves the accuracy of formula-based debugging by leveraging statistical fault-localization information that accounts for passing tests. Although OFC and CW are only a first step towards making formula-based debugging more applicable, our empirical results show that they are effective and improve the state of the art.