Fit2Crash: Specialising Fitness Functions for Crash Reproduction
S. Xiang (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Andy Zaidman – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
Annibale Panichella – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
J.G.H. Cockx – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Programming Languages)
Xavier DEVROEY – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
P. Derakhshanfar – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
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Abstract
Software applications inevitably crash, and it is time-consuming to recreate the crash conditions for debugging. Recently, researchers have developed frameworks relying on genetic algorithms, e.g. Botsing, for automated crash reproduction. However, the existing approaches process exceptions of different types as if they were the same. In this thesis, we study how the four most common types of Java exceptions are thrown and define specialised fitness functions for them. We have extended Botsing and carried out an evaluation against 52 real-world crashes from seven various open-source software applications. Our results show that our proposed fitness functions influence both the effectiveness and efficiency, negatively or positively depending on the type of the target exception. This thesis demonstrates how tailoring the fitness functions according to the exception type can improve search-based crash reproduction.