Follow the path: Debugging tools for test-driven fault navigation

Debugging failing test cases, particularly the search for failure causes, is often a laborious and time-consuming activity. Standard debugging tools such as symbolic debuggers and test runners hardly facilitate developers during this task because they neither provide advice to failure causes nor back-in-time capabilities. In this paper, we present test-driven fault navigation as a debugging guide that integrates spectrum-based and state anomalies into execution histories in order to systematically trace failure causes back to defects. We describe and demonstrate our Path tools that implement our debugging method for the Squeak/Smalltalk development environment.