MARY JEAN HARROLD
ADVANCE Professor of Computing,
Georgia Institute of Technology
Improved Debugging Using Automatic Fault-localization Techniques
ABSTRACT: Debugging software is an expensive and mostly manual process. Of all debugging activities, locating the faults, or fault localization, is the most expensive. To reduce the time required to locate faults, and thus the expense of debugging, we have developed techniques to automate the process of searching for faults. In this talk, I will present these techniques. First, I will present our general technique that uses information about the execution of a set of test cases—some passing and some failing--to rank parts of the program, such as statements, according to their suspiciousness of being faulty. Next, I will discuss our technique that uses similarities among test cases to cluster the test cases and create specialized test suites that can be used to more efficiently find individual faults and perform the fault-localization of multiple faults in parallel. Finally, I will present the results of two empirical studies. One study evaluates our general technique and shows that it outperforms other techniques that have the same goal. The other study demonstrates that our specialized test suites can reduce the time to find faults and provide an effective way to perform the fault localization in parallel.
BIO: Mary Jean Harrold is the ADVANCE Professor of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She performs research in analysis and testing of large evolving software, fault localization and failure identification using statistical analysis, machine learnng, and visualization, monitoring deployed software to improve quality, and software self-awareness through real-time assessment and response. She has received funding consistently for her research from agencies, such as NSF and NASA, and industries, such as Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Tata Consultancy Services. Professor Harrold received an NSF NYI Award and was named an ACM Fellow. She serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOPLAS and TOSEM and JSTVR, and is a a member of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA). Professor Harrold actively works to increase the participation of women in computing. She is a member, and past co-chair, of CRA-W and a member of the Leadership Team of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). Professor Harrold received the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh.
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