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Simplifying and isolating failure-inducing input
Abstract
Given some test case, a program fails. Which circumstances of the test case are responsible for the particular failure? The delta debugging algorithm generalizes and simplifies the failing test case to a minimal test case that still produces the failure. It also isolates the difference between a passing and a failing test case. In a case study, the Mozilla Web browser crashed after 95 user actions. Our prototype implementation automatically simplified the input to three relevant user actions. Likewise, it simplified 896 lines of HTML to the single line that caused the failure. The case study required 139 automated test runs or 35 minutes on a 500 MHz PC.
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Cited by
A Survey on Software Fault Localization
Wong, W. E., Gao, R., Li, Y., Abreu, R., & Wotawa, F. (2016) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2016.2521368 · Cited by 1,110
The oracle problem in software testing: A survey
Barr, E. T., Harman, M., McMinn, P., Shahbaz, M., & Yoo, S. (2015) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2014.2372785 · Cited by 1,104
Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers
Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J. (2011) · Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation · doi:10.1145/1993498.1993532 · Cited by 825
Zhou, J., Zhang, H., & Lo, D. (2012) · 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) · doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227210 · Cited by 507
Zhou, X., Peng, X., Xie, T., Sun, J., Ji, C., Li, W., & Ding, D. (2021) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2018.2887384 · Cited by 410
Metadata
- Authors
- Zeller, A., & Hildebrandt, R.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 2002-02
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 183-200
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-3520
- 2326-3881
- OpenAlex
- W2170224888
- Cited by
- 1,079
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 74.18
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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