Lightweight defect localization for Java

Abstract

A common method to localize defects is to compare the coverage of passing and failing program runs: A method executed only in failing runs, for instance, is likely to point to the defect. However, some failures, occur only after a specific sequence of method calls, such as multiple deallocations of the same resource. Such sequences can be collected from arbitrary Java programs at low cost; comparing object-specific sequences predicts defects better than simply comparing coverage. In a controlled experiment, our technique pinpointed the defective class in 39% of all test runs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.