Evolutionary testing for crash reproduction

Conference paper (2016)

Authors

M. Soltani Software Engineering - EEMCS
A. Panichella Software Engineering - EEMCS
A. van Deursen Software Technology
Department
Software Technology
Copyright: © 2016 M. Soltani, A. Panichella, A. van Deursen
DOI
help_outline
https://doi.org/10.1145/2897010.2897015
Genetic Algorithm Crash reproduction Search-based software testing Test case generation
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

14-05-2016

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Department

Software Technology

Abstract

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 covering a wider range of crashes because generating helpful tests that trigger specific execution paths is particularly challenging. In this paper, we propose a new solution for automatic crash reproduction based on evolutionary unit test generation techniques. The proposed solution exploits crash data from collected stack traces to guide search-based algorithms toward the generation of unit test cases that can reproduce the original crashes. Results from our preliminary study on real crashes from Apache Commons libraries show that our solution can successfully reproduce crashes which are not reproducible by two other state-of-art techniques.