ISSTA 2019
Mon 15 - Fri 19 July 2019 Beijing, China
Fri 19 Jul 2019 12:07 - 12:30 at Grand Ballroom - Static Analysis and Debugging Chair(s): Arie van Deursen

When improving their code, developers often turn to interactive debuggers. The correctness of these tools is crucial, because bugs in the debugger itself may mislead a developer, e.g., to believe that executed code is never reached or that a variable has another value than in the actual execution. Yet, debuggers are difficult to test because their input consists of both source code and a sequence of debugging actions, such as setting breakpoints or stepping through code. This paper presents the first metamorphic testing approach for debuggers. The key idea is to transform both the debugged code and the debugging actions in such a way that the behavior of the original and the transformed inputs should differ only in specific ways. For example, adding a breakpoint should not change the flow of control of the debugged program. To support the interactive nature of debuggers, we introduce interactive metamorphic testing. It differs from traditional metamorphic testing by determining the input transformation and the expected behavioral change it causes while the program under test is running. Our evaluation applies the approach to the widely used debugger in the Chromium browser, where it finds previously eight unknown bugs with a true positive rate of 51%. All bugs have been confirmed by the developers, and two bugs have even been marked as release-blocking.

Fri 19 Jul

Displayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change

11:00 - 12:30
Static Analysis and DebuggingTechnical Papers at Grand Ballroom
Chair(s): Arie van Deursen Delft University of Technology
11:00
22m
Talk
Differentially Testing Soundness and Precision of Program Analyzers
Technical Papers
Christian Klinger University of Texas, Austin, Maria Christakis MPI-SWS, Valentin Wüstholz ConsenSys Diligence
Pre-print
11:22
22m
Talk
Judge: Identifying, Understanding, and Evaluating Sources of Unsoundness in Call Graphs
Technical Papers
Michael Reif TU Darmstadt, Germany, Florian Kübler TU Darmstadt, Germany, Michael Eichberg TU Darmstadt, Germany, Dominik Helm TU Darmstadt, Germany, Mira Mezini TU Darmstadt, Germany
Pre-print File Attached
11:45
22m
Talk
Adlib: Analyzer for Mobile Ad Platform LibrariesArtifacts ReusableArtifacts Functional
Technical Papers
Sungho Lee KAIST, South Korea, Sukyoung Ryu KAIST, South Korea
DOI Pre-print
12:07
22m
Talk
Interactive Metamorphic Testing of Debuggers
Technical Papers
Sandro Tolksdorf TU Darmstadt, Daniel Lehmann TU Darmstadt, Michael Pradel TU Darmstadt and Facebook
Link to publication DOI Pre-print