Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (IPD), Chair Prof. Böhm

Scalable Software-Defect Localisation by Hierarchical Mining of Dynamic Call Graphs

  • Author:

    Frank Eichinger, Christopher Oßner, Klemens Böhm

  • Source:

    Proceedings of the 11th SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), Mesa, USA, 2011

  • The localisation of defects in computer programmes is essential in software engineering and is important in domain-specific data mining. Existing techniques which build on call-graph mining localise defects well, but do not scale for large software projects. This paper presents a hierarchical approach with good scalability characteristics. It makes use of novel call-graph representations, frequent subgraph mining and feature selection. It first analyses call graphs of a coarse granularity, before it zooms-in into more fine-grained graphs. We evaluate our approach with defects in the Mozilla Rhino project: In our setup, it narrows down the code a developer has to examine to about 6% only.

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