A sketching-based approach for debugging using test cases

Abstract

Manually locating and removing bugs in faulty code is often tedious and error-prone. Despite much progress in automated debugging, developing effective debugging techniques remains a challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach that uses a well-known program synthesis technique to automate debugging. As inputs, our approach takes a program and a test suite (with some passing and some failing tests), similar to various other recent techniques. Our key insight is to reduce the problem of finding a fix to the problem of program sketching. We translate the faulty program into a sketch of the correct program, and use off-the-shelf sketching technology to create a program that is correct with respect to the given test cases. The experimental evaluation using a suite of small, yet complex programs shows that our prototype embodiment of our approach is more effective than previous state-of-the-art.