Feedback-Directed Differential Testing of Interactive Debuggers
To understand, localize, and fix programming errors, developers often rely on interactive debuggers. However, as debuggers are software, they may themselves have bugs, which can make debugging unnecessarily hard or even cause developers to reason about bugs that do not actually exist in their code. This paper presents the first automated testing technique for interactive debuggers. The problem of testing debuggers is fundamentally different from the well-studied problem of testing compilers because debuggers are interactive and because they lack a specification of expected behavior. Our approach, called DBDB, generates debugger actions to exercise the debugger and records traces that summarize the debugger's behavior. By comparing traces of multiple debuggers with each other, we find diverging behavior that points to bugs and other noteworthy differences. We evaluate DBDB on the JavaScript debuggers of Firefox and Chromium, finding 19 previously unreported bugs, eight of which are already fixed by the developers.
Thu 8 NovDisplayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change
13:30 - 15:00 | Debugging and Bug LocalizationResearch Papers at Horizons 6-9F Chair(s): Earlence Fernandes University of Michigan | ||
13:30 22mTalk | Automated Patch Extraction via Syntax- and Semantics-Aware Delta Debugging on Source Code Changes Research Papers Masatomo Hashimoto Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan, Akira Mori National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan, Tomonori Izumida IIJ Innovation Institute, Japan Link to publication DOI Authorizer link | ||
13:52 22mTalk | Feedback-Directed Differential Testing of Interactive Debuggers Research Papers | ||
14:15 22mTalk | Improving IR-Based Bug Localization with Context-Aware Query Reformulation Research Papers Pre-print | ||
14:37 22mTalk | How Should Compilers Explain Problems to Developers? Research Papers Titus Barik Microsoft, Denae Ford North Carolina State University, Emerson Murphy-Hill North Carolina State University, Chris Parnin NCSU Pre-print |