Delta-debugging on traces

Abstract

<p>Debugging is challenging and time-consuming to find the cause of a failure by inspecting source code. In this creative component, we firstly apply delta-debugging to reduce C program traces for bug diagnosis. Taking a single failing run, we generate a trace. We use a tool from our lab, namely, Helium, to generate an executable program from the trace and reduce the program with the delta debugging tool C-Reduce. The results contain only the statements that are sufficient to reproduce the failure. We studied C-Reduce and used C-Reduce with two reduction settings. The size of the reduced program with reproduction setting 1 is smaller or equal to the size of the reduced program with reproduction setting 2 due to function merging. Compared with the traces, we totally reduced 74.38% of code with reduction setting 1 and 71.98% of the code with reduction setting 2.</p>