CS Faculty Candidate Colloquium
Wednesday **Special Time and Location** February 27 10:45 - 11:50 AM Kelley 1007 James Jones EECS Colloquium: Computer Science Faculty Candidate College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Automatic Fault Localization One of the most expensive and time-consuming components of the software debugging process is locating the faults (or bugs). To locate faults, developers must identify statements involved in failures and select suspicious statements that might contain faults. In practice, this localization is done by developers in a tedious and manual way, using only a single execution, targeting only one fault, and having a limited perspective into a large search space. There are a number of ways, however, that this approach can be improved. First, the manual process of identifying the locations of the faults can be very time consuming. A technique that can automate, or partially automate, the process can provide significant savings. Second, tools based on this approach lead developers to concentrate their attention locally instead of providing a global view of the software. An approach that provides a developer with a global view of the software, while still giving access to the local view, can provide more useful information. Third, the tools use results of only one execution of the program instead of using information provided by many executions of the program. A tool that provides information about many executions of the program can help the developer understand more complex relationships in the system. Also, by utilizing more executions, an approach can allow multiple faults to be found. My research addresses these key limitations. In this talk, I will present my technique and tool, called Tarantula, that can automate fault localization with the use of commonly available dynamic information gathered from test-case executions. I will demonstrate that this technique is both effective and efficient, and is scalable to large programs that potentially contain multiple faults. Biography: James Jones is a doctoral candidate in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology with a focus on Software Engineering. His research seeks to provide practical, automatic tools that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of software development and maintenance tasks. His research interests include software analysis, testing, and debugging. James received the B.S. in Computer Science at Ohio State University in 1996. After graduation, he worked at Ohio State as a Systems Engineer/Developer developing software-analysis tools to support research in the area. More information about James's research is available at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~jjones/.
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