AFID: An Automated Fault Identification Tool

Featuring Brian Demsky, Ph.D.
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, UC Irvine

Location:  McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium
Free and open to the public

Abstract:

Demsky will present the Automatic Fault Identification Tool (AFID).  AFID automatically constructs repositories of real software faults by monitoring the software development process.  AFID records both a fault revealing test case and a faulty version of the source code for any crashing faults that the developer discovers, and a fault correcting source code change for any crashing faults that the developer corrects. The test cases are a significant contribution, because they enable new research that explores the dynamic behaviors of the software faults. 

AFID uses a ptrace-based monitoring mechanism to monitor both the compilation and execution of the application.  The ptrace-based technique makes it straightforward for AFID to support a wide range of programming languages and compilers. Our benchmark results indicate that the monitoring overhead will be acceptable for most developers.  We performed a short case study to evaluate how effectively the AFID tool records software faults. In our case study, AFID recorded 12 software faults from the eight participants.

Please visit the EECS Colloquium website for a complete list of lectures.