Automatically reducing tree-structured test inputs

Herfert, Satia; Patra, Jibesh; Pradel, Michael

doi:10.1109/ase.2017.8115697

Cited by 33 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…This can inflate the priority of some nodes in the work queue and leads to poor performance. Like other program reduction algorithms [3,5,6,11,12], Algorithm 1 is used to compute a fixed point. That is, in practice the algorithm is repeated until no further reductions can be made.…”

Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These face challenges when reducing hierarchical inputs. Several techniques focus on reducing hierarchically structured test cases [3,4,6,11,12,19,20]. Among these, only Perses is priority aware, in spite of its priority inversion.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, Simp is specific to SQL Queries. GTR [12] is notable in that it is trained when to apply different reduction operations. Finally, C-Reduce [5] is a tool for reducing C/C++ test cases that requires extensive domain-specific knowledge.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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: Priority Aware Test Case Reduction

Gharachorlu

Sumner

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Test cases play an important role in testing and debugging software. Smaller tests are easier to understand and use for these tasks. Given a test that demonstrates a bug, test case reduction finds a smaller variant of the test case that exhibits the same bug. Classically, one of the challenges for test case reduction is that the process is slow, often taking hours. For hierarchically structured inputs like source code, the state of the art is Perses, a recent grammar aware and queue driven approach for test case reduction. Perses traverses nodes in the abstract syntax tree (AST) of a program (test case) based on a priority order and tries to reduce them while preserving syntactic validity. In this paper, we show that Perses' reduction strategy suffers from priority inversion, where significant time may be spent trying to perform reduction operations on lower priority portions of the AST. We show that this adversely affects the reduction speed. We propose Pardis, a technique for priority aware test case reduction that avoids priority inversion. We implemented Pardis and evaluated it on the same set of benchmarks used in the Perses evaluation. Our results indicate that compared to Perses, Pardis is able to reduce test cases 1.3x to 7.8x faster and with 46% to 80% fewer queries.

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Section: Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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: Priority Aware Test Case Reduction

Gharachorlu

Sumner

2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Automatic reduction of input files which cause a compiler error greatly simplifies the debugging process, as it removes irrelevant details, allowing the developer to better understand and focus on what triggers the bug. Several techniques such as delta debugging [1], program slicing [2] and their various improvements [3], [4], [5] attempt to deal with this problem. These methods are language-agnostic, which is their clear-cut advantage; however, in practice they often are hard to employ efficiently for real-world cases, with complex language-specific interdependencies and features.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ReduKtor: How We Stopped Worrying About Bugs in Kotlin Compiler

Stepanov

Akhin

Belyaev

2019

2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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Bug localization is well-known to be a difficult problem in software engineering, and specifically in compiler development, where it is beneficial to reduce the input program to a minimal reproducing example; this technique is more commonly known as delta debugging. What additionally contributes to the problem is that every new programming language has its own unique quirks and foibles, making it near impossible to reuse existing tools and approaches with full efficiency. In this experience paper we tackle the delta debugging problem w.r.t. Kotlin, a relatively new programming language from JetBrains. Our approach is based on a novel combination of program slicing, hierarchical delta debugging and Kotlin-specific transformations, which are synergistic to each other. We implemented it in a prototype called ReduKtor and did extensive evaluation on both synthetic and real Kotlin programs; we also compared its performance with classic delta debugging techniques. The evaluation results support the practical usability of our approach to Kotlin delta debugging and also shows the importance of using both language-agnostic and language-specific techniques to achieve best reduction efficiency and performance.

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“…Herfert et al [35] also combined subtree removal and hoisting in their Generalized Tree Reduction (GTR) algorithm but instead of analyzing a grammar to decide about the applicability of a certain transformation they learned this information from an existing test corpus. Regehr et al also used transformations in their tool C-Reduce [81], which is used to reduce C/C++ sources, but they applied language-specific transformations based on the semantics obtained by Clang.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fuzz Testing and Test Case Reduction

Hodován¹

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When looking back on our lives, it is often hard to determine the point when our current path or profession was chosen. Some people say that they have always known what career they wanted to pursue, others made the decision right before the college application deadline, and there are those who are still uncertain whether they made the right choice even after getting a degree. As for me, the only thing I know for sure is that I have always been fascinated by movies about hackers, even by the not so good ones. I never truly believed that one day I was going to do something similar, but now, 20 years later, here I am. Hunting for issues, reporting security bugs, and writing my thesis. Over the years I slowly realized that nothing could be further from computer science than those movies. However, while sitting in front of my computer, I still often find myself imagine being the protagonist of such a story. And I start to believe that this is reality now. Getting here has been a long journey, but by no means a lonely one. Many people helped me along the way and I will always be grateful to them. Chronologically first, I would like to say thank you to my high school teachers, Zsuzsanna Bali and Imre Szőke, who persuaded me that girls could also become computer scientists. I am thankful to Tibor Gyimóthy who invited me to join the Department of Software Engineering many years ago and later became my Ph.D. supervisor. I am grateful to him and to Ákos Kiss for their continuous support, especially after I left the safe harbour by choosing a topic that has not had a long research history at our department. I am also thankful to Gábor Lóki and Zoltán Herczeg for putting my research into practice. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family that they provided a pleasant background to my studies throughout the years and also encouraged me to go on with my research.

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Automatically reducing tree-structured test inputs

Cited by 33 publications

References 31 publications

: Priority Aware Test Case Reduction

: Priority Aware Test Case Reduction

ReduKtor: How We Stopped Worrying About Bugs in Kotlin Compiler

Fuzz Testing and Test Case Reduction

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