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Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why?
Open accessAbstract
Imagine some program and a number of changes. If none of these changes is applied (“yesterday”), the program works. If all changes are applied (“today”), the program does not work. Which change is responsible for the failure? We present an efficient algorithm that determines the minimal set of failure-inducing changes. Our delta debugging prototype tracked down a single failure-inducing change from 178,000 changed GDB lines within a few hours.
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Citations
Cited by
GenProg: A Generic Method for Automatic Software Repair
Le Goues, C., Nguyen, T., Forrest, S., & Weimer, W. (2012) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2011.104 · Cited by 1,085
Simplifying and isolating failure-inducing input
Zeller, A., & Hildebrandt, R. (2002) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/32.988498 · Cited by 1,079
Self-citationFrom symptom to cause: localizing errors in counterexample traces
Ball, T., Naik, M., & Rajamani, S. K. (2003) · Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages · doi:10.1145/604131.604140 · Cited by 294
How Programmers Debug, Revisited: An Information Foraging Theory Perspective
Lawrance, J., Bogart, C., Burnett, M., Bellamy, R., Rector, K., & Fleming, S. D. (2013) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2010.111 · Cited by 142
A large-scale longitudinal study of flaky tests
Lam, W., Winter, S., Wei, A., Xie, T., Marinov, D., & Bell, J. (2020) · Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages · doi:10.1145/3428270 · Cited by 64
“In theory, we could use delta debugging [Zeller 1999] to automatically identify the change (or, more precisely, a set of changes), but in practice, there are no readily available tools for Java and Maven projects.”
Method
Metadata
- Authors
- Zeller, A.
- Venue
- ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
- Published
- 1999-10
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 253-267
- ISSN
- 0163-5948 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2148329403
- Cited by
- 360
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 8.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/318774.318946
- The paper
- Zeller, A. (1999). Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why? ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes. https://doi.org/10.1145/318774.318946
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
