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Simplifying failure-inducing input

Published: 01 August 2000 Publication History

Abstract

Given some test case, a program fails. Which part of the test case is responsible for the particular failure? We show how our delta debugging algorithm generalizes and simplifies some failing input to a minimal test case that produces the failure.
In a case study, the Mozilla web browser crashed after 95 user actions. Our prototype implementation automatically simplified the input to 3 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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  • (2021)Survey on test case generation, selection and prioritization for cyber‐physical systemsSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.179432:1Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
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Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes  Volume 25, Issue 5
Sept. 2000
211 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/347636
Issue’s Table of Contents
  • cover image ACM Conferences
    ISSTA '00: Proceedings of the 2000 ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Software testing and analysis
    August 2000
    211 pages
    ISBN:1581132662
    DOI:10.1145/347324
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 ACM 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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 August 2000
Published in SIGSOFT Volume 25, Issue 5

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  1. automated debugging
  2. combinatorial testing

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Cited By

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  • (2023)An Empirical Study of Greedy Test Suite Minimization Techniques Using Mutation CoverageIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.328907311(65427-65442)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)The effect of hoisting on variants of Hierarchical Delta DebuggingJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.248334:11Online publication date: 19-Jun-2022
  • (2021)Survey on test case generation, selection and prioritization for cyber‐physical systemsSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.179432:1Online publication date: 15-Sep-2021
  • (2016)Simulink fault localization: an iterative statistical debugging approachSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.160526:6(431-459)Online publication date: 11-May-2016
  • (2015)Empirically detecting false test alarms using association rulesProceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 210.5555/2819009.2819018(39-48)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
  • (2015)Empirically Detecting False Test Alarms Using Association Rules2015 IEEE/ACM 37th IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2015.133(39-48)Online publication date: May-2015
  • (2015)Cause reduction: delta debugging, even without bugsSoftware Testing, Verification and Reliability10.1002/stvr.157426:1(40-68)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2015
  • (2010)Software Testing with QuickCheckCentral European Functional Programming School10.1007/978-3-642-17685-2_6(183-223)Online publication date: 2010
  • (2009)Software testing with QuickCheckProceedings of the Third summer school conference on Central European functional programming school10.5555/1939128.1939134(183-223)Online publication date: 21-May-2009
  • (2006)Fundamentals of debugging using a resolution calculusProceedings of the 9th international conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering10.1007/11693017_21(278-292)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2006
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