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short-paper

Ayudante: identifying undesired variable interactions

Authors:

Juan Caballero,

Michael D. ErnstAuthors Info & Claims

WODA 2015: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis

Pages 8 - 13

https://doi.org/10.1145/2823363.2823366

Published: 26 October 2015 Publication History

Abstract

A common programming mistake is for incompatible variables to interact, e.g., storing euros in a variable that should hold dollars, or using an array index with the wrong array. This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying undesired interactions between program variables. Our approach uses two different mechanisms to identify related variables. Natural language processing (NLP) identifies variables with related names that may have related semantics. Abstract type inference (ATI) identifies variables that interact with each other. Any discrepancies between these two mechanisms may indicate a programming error. We have implemented our approach in a tool called Ayudante. We evaluated Ayudante using two open-source programs: the Exim mail server and grep. Although these programs have been extensively tested and in deployment for years, Ayudante’s first report for grep revealed a programming mistake.

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Cited By

Kate SChinn MChoi HZhang XElbaum SSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)PHYSFRAME: type checking physical frames of reference for robotic systemsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468608(45-56)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468608
Dash SAllamanis MBarr ELeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)RefiNym: using names to refine typesProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236042(107-117)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236042
Kate SOre JZhang XElbaum SXu ZLeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Phys: probabilistic physical unit assignment and inconsistency detectionProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236035(563-573)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236035

Index Terms

Ayudante: identifying undesired variable interactions
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WODA 2015: Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis

October 2015

38 pages

ISBN:9781450339094

DOI:10.1145/2823363

Program Chairs:
Harry Xu,
Walter Binder

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 October 2015

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SPLASH '15: Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 26, 2015

PA, Pittsburgh, USA

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Cited By

Kate SChinn MChoi HZhang XElbaum SSpinellis DGousios GChechik MDi Penta M(2021)PHYSFRAME: type checking physical frames of reference for robotic systemsProceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3468264.3468608(45-56)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3468264.3468608
Dash SAllamanis MBarr ELeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)RefiNym: using names to refine typesProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236042(107-117)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236042
Kate SOre JZhang XElbaum SXu ZLeavens GGarcia APăsăreanu C(2018)Phys: probabilistic physical unit assignment and inconsistency detectionProceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3236024.3236035(563-573)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3236024.3236035

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