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ST

Yesterday, my program worked. Today, it does not. Why?

Andreas Zeller
Universität Passau
Lehrstuhl für Softwaresysteme
Innstraße 33
94032 Passau, Germany

Phone: +49 851 509-30 91
Fax: +49 851 509-30 92
e-mail: snelting@fmi.uni-passau.de
WWW: http://www.infosun.fmi.uni-passau.de/st/
Proc. ESEC/FSE 99, Toulouse, France, September 1999, Vol. 1687 of LNCS, pp. 253-267.

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Testing and test tools, Regression testing, Debugging

Contents

Download

ESEC'99 version (176k, PDF)
Original technical report (101k, compressed PostScript)
Slides of ESEC'99 talk (174k, PDF)

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Lehrstuhl Softwaresysteme <snelting@fmi.uni-passau.de> - Last modified: 02/15/2001