Summary of Search-based Crash Reproduction using Behavioral Model Seeding

This is an extended abstract of the article: Pouria Derakhshanfar, Xavier Devroey, Gilles Perrouin, Andy Zaidman and Arie van Deursen. 2019. Search-based crash reproduction using behavioural model seeding. In: Software Testing, Verification and Reliability (May 2020). http://doi.org/10.1002/stvr.1733.

A benchmark-based evaluation of search-based crash reproduction

Crash reproduction approaches help developers during debugging by generating a test case that reproduces a given crash. Several solutions have been proposed to automate this task. However, the proposed solutions have been evaluated on a limited number of projects, making comparison difficult. In this paper, we enhance this line of research by...

Crash Reproduction Using Helper Objectives

Evolutionary-based crash reproduction techniques aid developers in their debugging practices by generating a test case that reproduces a crash given its stack trace. In these techniques, the search process is typically guided by a single search objective called Crash Distance. Previous studies have shown that current approaches could only...

Search-based crash reproduction using behavioural model seeding

Search-based crash reproduction approaches assist developers during debugging by generating a test case, which reproduces a crash given its stack trace. One of the fundamental steps of this approach is creating objects needed to trigger the crash. One way to overcome this limitation is seeding: using information about the application during the...

Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Its Impact on Debugging

Software systems fail. These failures are often reported to issue tracking systems, where they are prioritized and assigned to responsible developers to be investigated. When developers debug software, they need to reproduce the reported failure in order to verify whether their fix actually prevents the failure from happening again. Since...

Botsing, a Search-based Crash Reproduction Framework for Java

Approaches for automatic crash reproduction aim to generate test cases that reproduce crashes starting from the crash stack traces. These tests help developers during their debugging practices. One of the most promising techniques in this research field leverages search-based software testing techniques for generating crash reproducing test...

Good Things Come In Threes: Improving Search-based Crash Reproduction With Helper Objectives

Writing a test case reproducing a reported software crash is a common practice to identify the root cause of an anomaly in the software under test. However, this task is usually labor-intensive and time-taking. Hence, evolutionary intelligence approaches have been successfully applied to assist developers during debugging by generating a test...

Generating Highly-structured Input Data by Combining Search-based Testing and Grammar-based Fuzzing

Software testing is an important and time-consuming task that is often done manually. In the last decades, researchers have come up with techniques to generate input data (e.g., fuzzing) and automate the process of generating test cases (e.g., search-based testing). However, these techniques are known to have their own limitations: search-based...

Effective and Efficient API Misuse Detection via Exception Propagation and Search-Based Testing

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) typically come with (implicit) usage constraints. The violations of these constraints (API misuses) can lead to software crashes. Even though there are several tools that can detect API misuses, most of them suffer from a very high rate of false positives. We introduce Catcher, a novel API misuse...

A Guided Genetic Algorithm for Automated Crash Reproduction

To reduce the effort developers have to make for crash debugging, researchers have proposed several solutions for automatic failure reproduction. Recent advances proposed the use of symbolic execution, mutation analysis, and directed model checking as underling techniques for post-failure analysis of crash stack traces. However, existing...

Evolutionary testing for crash reproduction

Manual crash reproduction is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. Therefore, several solutions have been proposed in literature for automatic crash reproduction, including generating unit tests via symbolic execution and mutation analysis. However, various limitations adversely affect the capabilities of the existing solutions in...