Mining Behavior Graphs for "Backtrace" of Noncrashing Bugs

Analyzing the executions of a buggy software program is essentially a data mining process. Although many interesting methods have been developed to trace crashing bugs (such as memory violation and core dumps), it is still difficult to analyze noncrashing bugs (such as logical errors). In this paper, we develop a novel method to classify the structured traces of program executions using software behavior graphs. By analyzing the correct and incorrect executions, we have made good progress at the isolation of program regions that may lead to the faulty executions. The classification framework is built on an integration of closed graph mining and SVM classification. More interestingly, suspicious regions are identified through the capture of the classification accuracy change, which is measured incrementally during program execution. Our performance study and case-based experiments show that our approach is both effective and efficient.