A Systematic Study of Failure Proximity

Software end users are the best testers, who keep revealing bugs in software that has undergone rigorous in-house testing. In order to leverage their testing efforts, failure reporting components have been widely deployed in released software: The Microsoft Dr. Watson System [1] and the Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent [2] are the two most typical examples. Many utilities of the collected failure data depend on an effective failure indexing technique, which, in the optimal case, would index all failures caused by the same bug together. Unfortunately, the problem of failure proximity, which underpins the effectiveness of an indexing technique, has not been systematically studied. This paper presents the first systematic study of failure proximity. A failure proximity consists of two components: a fingerprinting function that extracts signatures from failures and a distance function that calculates (from the extracted signatures) the likelihood of two failures being due to the same bug. By...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Chao Liu 0001, Xiangyu Zhang, Jiawei Han
• Keywords: Effective Failure Indexing, Indexing Technique, Proximities, TSE 2008