Isolating cause-effect chains with AskIgor

Author

Zeller, Andreas

Author_Institution

Lehrstuhl fur Softwaretechnik, Saarlandes Univ., Saarbrucken, Germany

fYear

2003

fDate

10-11 May 2003

Firstpage

296

Lastpage

297

Abstract

AskIgor is a Web service for automatically determining causes of program failures. You submit an executable and two invocations: one where the program fails, and one where it passes. AskIgor compares these two runs and conducts a number of systematic tests to narrow down the set of failure-inducing variable values automatically. This reveals the cause-effect chain of the failure - that is, the variables and values that caused the failure. In a case study, AskIgor successfully isolated the cause-effect chain for a failure of the GNU C compiler: "initially, the C program to be compiled contained an addition of 1.0; this caused an addition operator in the intermediate RTL representation; this caused a cycle in the RTL tree - and this caused the compiler to crash".

Keywords

C language; Web sites; program compilers; program debugging; reverse engineering; tree data structures; AskIgor; C program; GNU C compiler; RTL tree cycle; Web service; addition operator; automatic program failure determination; cause-effect chains; executable; failure-inducing variable values; intermediate RTL representation; invocations; systematic tests; Automatic testing; Computer crashes; Conferences; Debugging; Failure analysis; Instruments; Program processors; System testing; Web pages; Web services;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Program Comprehension, 2003. 11th IEEE International Workshop on

ISSN

1092-8138

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1883-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WPC.2003.1199221

Filename

1199221