Golden implementation driven software debugging

The presence of a functionally correct golden implementation has a significant advantage in the software development life cycle. Such a golden implementation is exploited for software development in several domains, including embedded software -- a low resourceconsuming version of the golden implementation. The golden implementation gives the functionality that the program is supposed to implement, and is used as a guide during the software development process. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using the golden implementation as a reference model in software debugging. We perform a substantial case study involving the Busybox embedded Linux utilities while treating the GNU Core Utilities as the golden or reference implementation. Our debugging method consists of dynamic slicing with respect to the observable error in both the implementations (the golden implementation as well as the buggy software). During dynamic slicing we also perform a stepby-step weakest preconditi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Ansuman Banerjee, Abhik Roychoudhury, Johannes A. Harlie, Zhenkai Liang
• Keywords: Golden Implementation, Observable Error, SIGSOFT 2010, Software Development, Software Engineering