Download: PDF, slides (PDF), slides (PowerPoint), FailureDoc implementation.
“Automated documentation inference to explain failed tests” by Sai Zhang, Cheng Zhang, and Michael D. Ernst. In ASE 2011: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, (Lawrence, KS, USA), Nov. 2011, pp. 63-72.
A failed test reveals a potential bug in the tested code. Developers need to understand which parts of the test are relevant to the failure before they start bug-fixing.
This paper presents a fully-automated technique (and its tool implementation, called FailureDoc) to explain a failed test. FailureDoc augments the failed test with explanatory documentation in the form of code comments. The comments indicate changes to the test that would cause it to pass, helping programmers understand why the test fails.
We evaluated FailureDoc on five real-world programs. FailureDoc generated meaningful comments for most of the failed tests. The inferred comments were concise and revealed important debugging clues. We further conducted a user study. The results showed that FailureDoc is useful in bug diagnosis.
Download: PDF, slides (PDF), slides (PowerPoint), FailureDoc implementation.
BibTeX entry:
@inproceedings{ZhangZE2011,
author = {Sai Zhang and Cheng Zhang and Michael D. Ernst},
title = {Automated documentation inference to explain failed tests},
booktitle = {ASE 2011: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International
Conference on Automated Software Engineering},
pages = {63--72},
address = {Lawrence, KS, USA},
month = nov,
year = {2011}
}
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