An Analysis of Missed Structure Field Handling Bugs

Despite the importance and prevalence of structures (or records) in programming, no study till now has deeply analyzed the bugs made in their usage. This paper makes a first step to fill that gap by systematically and deeply analyzing a subset of structure usage bugs. The subset, referred to as MSFH bugs, are errors of omission associated with structure fields when they are handled in a grouped context. We analyze the nature of these bugs by providing a taxonomy, root cause analysis, and barrier analysis. The analysis provided many new insights, which suggested new solutions for preventing and detecting the MSFH bugs.