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Automated debugging techniques aim to help developers locate and understand the cause of a failure, an extremely challenging yet fundamental task. Most state-of-the-art approaches suffer from two problems: they require a large number of passing and failing tests and report possible faulty code with no explanation. To mitigate these issues, we present MIMIC, a novel automated debugging technique that combines and extends our previous input generation and anomaly detection techniques. MIMIC (1) synthesizes multiple passing and failing executions similar to an observed failure and (2) uses these executions to detect anomalies in behavior that may explain the failure. We evaluated MIMIC on six failures of realworld programs with promising results: for five of these failures, MIMIC identified their root causes while producing a limited number of false positives. Most importantly, the anomalies identified by MIMIC provided information that may help developers understand (and ultimately eliminate) such root causes.

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Testing software applications by interacting with their graphical user interface (GUI) is an expensive and complex process. Current automatic test case generation techniques implement explorative approaches that, although producing useful test cases, have a limited capability of covering semantically relevant interactions, thus frequently missing important testing scenarios. These techniques typically interact with the available widgets following the structure of the GUI, without any guess about the functions that are executed. In this paper we propose Augusto, a test case generation technique that exploits a built-in knowledge of the semantics associated with popular and well-known functionalities, such as CRUD operations, to automatically generate effective test cases with automated functional oracles. Empirical results indicate that Augusto can reveal faults that cannot be revealed with state of the art techniques.

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