Propagating Bug Fixes with Fast Subgraph Matching

Author

Sun, Boya ; Shu, Gang ; Podgurski, Andy ; Li, Shirong ; Zhang, Shijie ; Yang, Jiong

fYear

2010

fDate

1-4 Nov. 2010

Firstpage

21

Lastpage

30

Abstract

We present a powerful and efficient approach to the problem of propagating a bug fix to all the locations in a code base to which it applies. Our approach represents bug and fix patterns as subgraphs of a system dependence graph, and it employs a fast, index-based subgraph matching algorithm to discover unfixed bug-pattern instances remaining in a code base. We have also developed a graphical tool to help programmers specify bug patterns and fix patterns easily. We evaluated our approach by applying it to bug fixes in four large open-source projects. The results indicate that the approach exhibits good recall and precision and excellent efficiency.

Keywords

graph theory; program debugging; bug fix propagation; graphical tool; subgraph matching algorithm; system dependence graph; Algorithm design and analysis; Computer bugs; Data structures; Indexing; Labeling; Pattern matching; detection; graph indexing; program dependence graph; subgraph matching;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), 2010 IEEE 21st International Symposium on

Conference_Location

San Jose, CA

ISSN

1071-9458

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-9056-1

Electronic_ISBN

1071-9458

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISSRE.2010.36

Filename

5635109