Software Tools Detect Bugs by Inferring Programmer's Intentions University of Illinois computer science professor Yuanyuan Zhou and her students have developed a suite of tools can that identify and correct software bugs by inferring the intentions of the programmer. The tools work by making observations of how the programmer writes code. "Most bug-detection tools require reproduction of bugs during execution," Zhou said. "The program is slowed down significantly and monitored by these tools, which watch for certain types of behavior. Most of our tools, however, work by only examining the source code for defects, requiring little effort from the programmers." Code in large programs is often copied and pasted, which, while saving a significant amount of time, is a frequent cause of bugs. Using data mining techniques, Zhou's CP-Miner searches through programs for copy-pasted code and scans for consistent modifications. CP-Miner, which can scan 3 million to 4 million lines of code in less than 30 minutes, has already found numerous bugs in some of the most popular open-source applications. Since large programs often rely on implicit rules and assumptions, Zhou and her students developed the PR-Miner tool to determine when those rules have been broken. Like CP-Miner, PR-Miner uses data-mining techniques and works very quickly. Zhou and her students have also developed tools to help software keep running even in the presence of bugs, such as the Rx recovery tool. Zhou says, "Rx is avoidance therapy for software failure. If the software fails, Rx rolls the program back to a recent checkpoint, and re-executes the program in a modified environment." Another tool, Triage, identifies and diagnoses the nature of a failure at the end-user site and helps the programmer work to correct it. Gregory Woodhouse "Judge a man by his questions not his answers." --Voltaire |
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