A Study of Eliminating Irrelevant Access Patterns for Fault Localization in Concurrent Programs

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "A Study of Eliminating Irrelevant Access Patterns for
Fault Localization in Concurrent Programs"

By

Mr. Chi-Yin Poon


Abstract

Fault localization is a key step in software debugging processes. Existing 
tools use statistical analysis to identify program features that are related to 
bugs with ranking. This technique has been applied to identify suspicious 
access patterns in concurrent programs recently. However, our preliminary study 
shows that it is not effective to identify the helpful access patterns for 
debugging when it is applied to large software. This thesis aims to conduct a 
study on eliminating some of the irrelevant access patterns such that we can 
identify the helpful access patterns more effectively. In the study, we first 
measure the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art fault localization tool on 
large-scale software in terms of code examination effort. Then, we compare the 
differences before and after applying our approach that eliminates the 
irrelevant access patterns. The key idea of the approach is that not every 
segment of a program is related to the bug. We can confirm a relevant program 
segment through execution and restrict the scope of the analysis so as to 
eliminate the irrelevant access patterns outside the program segment. Our 
evaluation shows that it can save more than 85% of code examination effort 
after eliminating the irrelevant access patterns.


Date:			Monday, 20 August 2012

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Shing-Chi Cheung (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Charles Zhang (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Sunghun Kim


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