Searching Configurations to Reproduce Software Failures

MPhil Thesis Defence

Title: "Searching Configurations to Reproduce Software Failures"

By

Mr. Yueqi Li

Abstract

Reproducing software failures is important for developers to understand and fix 
software bugs. Issue tracking systems are prevalent today for bug reporting by 
users. However, developers may not always be able to reproduce the reported 
software failures by following these bug reports. A common cause of this 
problem is due to the missing software configuration details in the bug 
reports. This thesis proposes an approach to addressing the problem by 
recovering the missing configuration details. A major challenge of our approach 
is to deal with the huge number of possible configuration combinations. We 
observed that many configurations differ slightly. As such, we do not need to 
restart the application for each configuration. Instead, we can adapt the 
program state from the memory image of a previous configuration. We proposed a 
series of static and dynamic analysis techniques to efficiently identify 
configurations that are irrelevant to the reported failures. Our evaluation 
shows that our approach is able to recover missing configuration details, which 
reproduce real life software failures in projects with more than 400,000 lines 
of SLOCs.


Date:			Thursday, 22 July 2010

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3588
 			Lifts 27/28

Committee Members:	Dr. Shing-Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Charles Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****