Title: Statistical Fault Localization: Challenges and Solutions
Presenter: Dr. Wing-Kwong Chan
Time: 2:00 PM , Thursday , 4 Jun 2010
Location: Room 506, MMW Building

Abstract: Program debugging is a procedure to locate faults in programs, repair them, and confirm the modified programs having removed the located faults. Fault localization is a precursor of fault repair and subsequent validations, and is time-consuming. To leverage the computation power of the underlying hardware platforms, in the recent decade, researchers propose techniques that employ statistical approaches to tackling the fault localization problem. These techniques typically find the fault-related positions in programs by comparing among the execution statistics of passed executions and failed executions to assess the fault suspiciousness of individual program entities separately. They ignore how infected program states may propagate via the executions in faulty programs. In this talk, I will present our recent research efforts on statistical fault localization. I will firstly present a technique that uses edge profiles to represent passed executions and failed executions, contrasts these profiles to model how each basic block contributes to the observed failures, and propagate these contributions among basic blocks on Program dependence graphs. Second, I will describe several issues that affect the discretionary powers of statistical fault localization techniques, including coincidental correctness, and assumptions of statistical models, and present our ongoing research that tackles these issues.

Wing-Kwong Chan (http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~wkchan/) is currently an assistant professor at Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. He received his BEng in Computer Engineering, MPhil and PhD degrees all from The University of Hong Kong. He was in the industry to manage and develop software applications for more than 10 years prior to returning to The University of Hong Kong to complete his PhD study. He is currently on the editorial board of Journal of Systems and Software, and serves as program chairs of QSIC 2010 and AST 2010, guest editors of international journals, and program committee members of many international conferences. His recent research interest is to address software analysis and testing challenges in service-oriented software, self-adaptive software, concurrent software, and utility programs. His work has been reported by over 60 articles at major publication outlets such as TSE, TOSEM, CACM, JSS, IST, STVR, ICSE, FSE, ASE, WWW, and ICDCS.