%0 Conference Paper
%B Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Applied computing
%D 2008
%T Automatic software fault localization using generic program invariants
%A Rui Abreu
%A González, Alberto
%A Zoeteweij, Peter
%A Van Gemund, Arjan JC
%C Ceará, Brazil
%I ACM
%P 712–717
%X <p>Despite extensive testing in the development phase, residual defects can be a great threat to dependability in the operational phase. This paper studies the utility of low-cost, generic invariants ("screeners") in their capacity of error detectors within a spectrum-based fault localization (SFL) approach aimed to diagnose program defects in the operational phase. The screeners considered are simple bit-mask and range invariants that screen every load/store and function argument/return program point. Their generic nature allows them to be automatically instrumented without any programmer-effort, while training is straightforward given the test cases available in the development phase. Experiments based on the Siemens program set demonstrate diagnostic performance that is similar to the traditional, development-time application of SFL based on the program pass/fail information known before-hand. This diagnostic performance is currently attained at an average 14% screener execution time overhead, but this overhead can be reduced at limited performance penalty.</p>
%8 March
%> https://haslab.uminho.pt/sites/default/files/ruimaranhao/files/sac08.pdf