Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Johnson, Brittany
• Brun, Yuriy
• Meliou, Alexandra

Titel

Causal Testing: Understanding Defects' Root Causes

Ist Teil von

• 2020 IEEE/ACM 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2020, p.87-99

Ort / Verlag

ACM

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

• IEEE_Xplore

Quelle

IEEE Electronic Library Online

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Understanding the root cause of a defect is critical to isolating and repairing buggy behavior. We present Causal Testing, a new method of root-cause analysis that relies on the theory of counterfactual causality to identify a set of executions that likely hold key causal information necessary to understand and repair buggy behavior. Using the Defects4J benchmark, we find that Causal Testing could be applied to 71% of real-world defects, and for 77% of those, it can help developers identify the root cause of the defect. A controlled experiment with 37 developers shows that Causal Testing improves participants' ability to identify the cause of the defect from 80% of the time with standard testing tools to 86% of the time with Causal Testing. The participants report that Causal Testing provides useful information they cannot get using tools such as JUnit. Holmes, our prototype, open-source Eclipse plugin implementation of Causal Testing, is available at http://holmes.cs.umass.edu/.