The Use of Program Profiling in Software Testing
Thomas Reps
This paper describes new techniques to help with testing and
debugging, using information obtained from path profiling. A path
profiler instruments a program so that each run of the program
generates a path spectrum for the execution\(ema distribution of
acyclic path fragments that were executed during that run. Our
techniques are based on the idea of comparing path spectra from
different runs of the program. When different runs produce different
spectra, the spectral differences can be used to identify paths in the
program along which control diverges in the two runs. By choosing
input datasets to hold all factors constant except one, the divergence
can be attributed to this factor. The point of divergence itself may
not be the cause of the underlying problem, but provides a starting
place for a programmer to begin his exploration.
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University of Wisconsin