How Bayesians Debug

Abstract

Manual debugging is expensive. And the high cost has motivated extensive research on automated fault localization in both software engineering and data mining communities. Fault localization aims at automatically locating likely fault locations, and hence assists manual debugging. A number of fault localization algorithms have been developed in recent years, which prove effective when multiple failing and passing cases are available. However, we notice what is more commonly encountered in practice is the two-sample debugging problem, where only one failing and one passing cases are available. This problem has been either overlooked or insufficiently tackled in previous studies. In this paper, we develop a new fault localization algorithm, named BayesDebug, which simulates some manual debugging principles through a Bayesian approach. Different from existing approaches that base fault analysis on multiple passing and failing cases, BayesDebug only requires one passing and one failing cases. We reason about why BayesDebug fits the two- sample debugging problem and why other approaches do not. Finally, an experiment with a real-world program grep-2.2 is conducted, which exemplifies the effectiveness of BayesDebug.