How to Effectively Reduce Failure Analysis Time?

Abstract

Debugging is one of the most expensive and challenging phases in the software development life-cycle. One important cost factor in the debugging process is the time required to analyze failures and find underlying faults. Two types of techniques that can help developers to reduce this analysis time are Failure Clustering and Automated Fault Localization. Although there is a plethora of these techniques in the literature, there are still some gaps that prevent their operationalization in real-world contexts. Besides, the abundance of these techniques confuses the developers in selecting a suitable method for their specific domain. In order to help developers in reducing analysis time, we propose methodologies and techniques that can be used standalone or in a form of a tool-chain. Utilizing this tool-chain, developers (1) know which data they need for further analysis, (2) are able to group failures based on their root causes, and (3) are able to find more information about the root causes of each failing group. Our tool-chain was initially developed based on state-of-the-art failure diagnosis techniques. We implemented and evaluated existing techniques. We built on and improved them where the results were promising and proposed new solutions where needed. The overarching goal of this study has been the applicability of techniques in practice.