| Title | Automated documentation inference to explain failed tests |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2011 |
| Authors | Zhang S, Zhang C, Ernst MD |
| Conference Name | ASE 2011: Proceedings of the 26th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering |
| Pagination | 63–72 |
| Date or Month Published | November |
| Conference Location | Lawrence, KS, USA |
| Abstract | A failed test reveals a potential bug in the tested code. Developers need to understand which parts of the test are relevant to the failure before they start bug-fixing. \par This paper presents a fully-automated technique (and its tool implementation, called FailureDoc) to explain a failed test. FailureDoc augments the failed test with explanatory documentation in the form of code comments. The comments indicate changes to the test that would cause it to pass, helping programmers understand why the test fails. \par We evaluated FailureDoc on five real-world programs. FailureDoc generated meaningful comments for most of the failed tests. The inferred comments were concise and revealed important debugging clues. We further conducted a user study. The results showed that FailureDoc is useful in bug diagnosis. |
| Downloads | https://code.google.com/archive/p/failuredoc/ FailureDoc implementation
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/test-documentation-ase2011.pdf PDF
https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~mernst/pubs/test-documentation-ase2011-... slides (PDF)
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| Citation Key | ZhangZE2011 |
