Constraint-Based Program Debugging Using Data Structure Repair

—Developers have used data structure repair over the last few decades as an effective means to recover on-the-fly from errors in program state. Traditional repair techniques were based on dedicated repair routines, whereas more recent techniques have used invariants that describe desired structural properties as the basis for repair. All repair techniques are designed with one primary goal: run-time error recovery. However, the actions that any such technique performs to repair an erroneous program state are meant to produce the effect of the actions of a (hypothetical) correct program. The key insight in this paper is that repair actions on the program state can guide debugging of code (when the erroneous program execution is due to a fault in the program and not an external event). er presents an approach that abstracts concrete repair actions that a routine performs to repair an erroneous state into a sequence of program statements that perform the same actions using variables vi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICST
• Authors: Muhammad Zubair Malik, Junaid Haroon Siddiqui, Sarfraz Khurshid
• Keywords: ICST 2011, Program State, Repair, Repair Techniques, Software Engineering